


Turned Around in Time

by Act_Naturally



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, suspension of belief in physics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2018-03-29 14:00:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3898957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Act_Naturally/pseuds/Act_Naturally
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time is strange. A greater understanding of the concept only illuminates how much we don't know. In everyday life it doesn't matter, as we're stuck in that dimension with no access to our past or future. Well, most of us. Like anything in Harry's life, the role time plays is... complicated.<br/>An attempt to blend the entire Marvel cinematic universe. Yeah, that's right. I am planning to trawl my way through the messed up, confusing timeline that is the Marvel-verse without just writing down the plot from each one. We all know what happened there, Harry changes that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Interim

_Definition: Interim_

_(Adjective) Having temporary effect_

_serving as a temporary measure until something more complete and permanent can be established_

_(Noun) A period of time between two occurrences or periods_

…

Harry Potter first came to the world at a specific coordinate in space-time. He entered England at 1980, and, not insignificantly, a prophecy that was to rule his life for the next seventeen years.

Had things been different, he may have grown up reading comics, watching _Back to the Future_ or _Doctor Who_. But science fiction was a strange quirk of normal boys, and while it was grudgingly permissible for Dudley, Harry was deemed so far past critically abnormal that the Dursleys feared fantasy might be the tipping point.

Harry hardly caught a glimpse, but he enjoyed those fragments immensely. He read one or two _Batman_ comics, a little _Superman_ , and heard about the stories that stuck around the longest, but not much else.

Unlike other children of the 80s, Harry’s childhood was void of science fiction. His teenage years compensated for this by being filled with magic, and in these years, he never really thought about fanciful things like time travel or aliens, even though by thirteen he’d had more personal experience in that department than most people.

It only became apparent much later, but when he saved himself with his patronus, the most important things were summarised in one exchange: “I knew I could do it this time because I’d already done it … does that make sense?”

Though he didn’t recognise it, in that moment, Harry attested to the inflexibility of time – he was saved by his spell, so he had to go back in time to cast it, because it had already happened. For a short length of time, he had already cast and was going to cast the lifesaving spell. So before and after… well, they’re flexible. Dependent on one’s point of reference, really. But events? Not so much.

“I don’t know,” Hermione had patently admitted she had no idea, and so captured the essence of just how mindboggling the whole concept is.

But the weird day passed without much acknowledgement and Harry never really contemplated it again.

Perhaps due to his fantasy-devoid formative years, Harry didn’t deal in hypotheticals, in the innumerable _what if_ s. He dealt with the present, and he thought on the future. To him, the past was for irrefutable things and hints of what would come back to bite him later. It was less important than what was to come, wherein the actual effort not to die would take place.

Indeed, he thought about death far more often than any child should. It surrounded him in first his parents, then his godfather, his friends, and countless strangers. He faced it, year after year, wondering if _this time_ he would catch it. Then he marched to it with open arms, the dead by his side.

And he came back.

With him were three souvenirs. The Deathly Hallows were thought to be no more than a story. Of course, personal experience discounted that theory. He united them.

Some believed that the three brothers had created the items, or maybe simply found them. Few believed that they were gifted by Death itself. Harry subscribed to the same doubt. Despite the proof of magic, he’d still come from a background with little patience for the blatantly fanciful. Harry preferred things he could see for himself.  

Regardless, the story had a name for the one person who was the master of the Elder Wand, the Cloak of Invisibility, and the Resurrection Stone; the Master of Death.

And he let it all go.

He graduated with Hermione. He followed Ron into the Auror corps. He embraced anonymity when the fervour of his victory died down. He left Ginny when they didn’t quite work.

He didn’t dwell on the Hallows; they seemed to have played such a small part in events, despite their alleged power.

He later forgave himself for that. He’d had more important things on his mind at the time.

For five glorious years, he moved on from his past, and for once he didn’t have to worry about the future. He lived each day in the present, until that day when he very literally couldn’t. Because he had been touched by objects that time would not let him forget.

…

Harry’s last blissfully normal day was in fact not all that serene.

He started around lunch time, equipped with a vengeful hangover, and he proceeded to stumble through the next few hours without enough coffee. He swore to give up this ambition to drink a Weasley under the table. At least once a week.

A little while, and a niggling feeling later, he realised that he’d misplaced his best friend, and he may have insulted his missing-best-friend’s wife. Ron and Hermione would forgive him.  

“It won’t happen again,” he declared solemnly.

Hermione shot him an unimpressed look that bordered on amusement if viewed from the right angle. “Yes, it will.”

He found he had to agree. “Sorry,” he grinned unashamedly.

Her mouth opened in reply, but that was the moment Harry’s vision whited out.

He was in an endless misty landscape. Painful memories of a similar experience with a train station and a dead headmaster were dragged to the fore. Cracking down on the immediate panic, he entertained the notion that he was hallucinating. Such occurrences weren’t unheard of when a Weasley Episode got out of hand. He hoped that was the case, but without much conviction.

When a black cloaked figure emerged from the expanse of white mist and addressed him, “Young one, welcome to Interim,” he felt a spike of pure and simple dread.

The name of the figure came to him, perhaps due to that instinct all living things possess, before the figure even announced; “I am Death.”

“But… I didn’t die.”

“No,” Death agreed. “You were called.”

“I– what?”

“Come.” The hand that touched his shoulder was oddly human in warmth and appearance. Wrinkles creased the skin, but the grip was steady.

Death looked as Harry would’ve imagined it, had he been the kind to personify such things – an old man, unremarkable except for his odd dress sense. His cloak was simple and unadorned, draped elegantly around him like a dark toga. Although he held himself slightly stooped, he was still taller than Harry.

Death led Harry to a bench and sat beside him.

Harry knew he should have felt uncomfortable as the silence drew on, but it was not easy to sense such things in that place. “Why am I here?” He eventual asked.

“A philosophical question, or one of logistics?” Death’s lips twitched. “No matter.” A wave of his hand sent the mist before them swirling. Colours bled into it, and Death’s words wove it into a narrative. “One being transcends the beginning of time and space as we know it, but others arose in short order. The first native entities include Eternity, Infinity, Oblivion, and myself. Then there were Celestials – ageless beings that mortals revere as gods. Life spread, and here you are.”

The mist showed colourful, fluid forms rising out of the darkness, coming together and against each other. They were beautiful and powerful, forces of nature in their own right, only somehow _more_ so.

“One resides over us all: the Living Tribunal. He is the judge of cosmic entities, and ensures that the laws are obeyed. He is Balance. We serve, and we maintain reality, we maintain the balance, by existing. Under out direct employ, are heralds. They have various purposes. For Galactus they act as seekers, for Eternity they are fates, and I have omens that represent aspects of my role.”

Death, was, in fact, going somewhere with this. He rarely said things without meaning, and, annoyingly, they frequently contained several more in disguise. “Under your hand, my Hallows were united in the manner they were intended. You released your attachment to the mortal realm, and in doing so mastered my very essence. You are worthy being an Omen of Death.”

Harry didn’t like the sound of that. A bad feeling crept in, strangely muted. “Do I get a say in this?”

Death smiled blandly. “I have been waiting for you.”

“So then this was my destiny, all along?” The words tasted bitter.

“You call it destiny, I call it time. Same concept, different perspective. Essentially, yes, this was, is and will be inevitable. You are my ambassador for sentient life. Death has many elements; you need only concern yourself with steadiness. Death is resolute and prevailing. And above all, Death always answers the call of life.”

“No, I’m done with fate! I played that part, I earned my life and I want it back, damn it. I won’t do it!”

“Child, you don’t have to do anything. We serve our existence by existing.”

…

The next thing he knew, Harry was stark naked. And sitting the middle of a runic pentagram, surrounded by a group of chanting and dancing witches.

“My Lord Death,” one of the older girls spoke in awe, “My name is Abigail. I command you to reap the souls of Elizabeth Proctor and–”

Something short-circuited in his head with a flash and a frantic _nope_. He apparated blindly before his blush could spread too far down.

It was a long, uncomfortable trip. The space squeezed him so tightly and for so long he got worryingly lightheaded. He couldn’t complain; after a stunt like that he was lucky to land at all.

He must have been wishing for a safe place, something specific. But if this suburban mess was London, it was hardly familiar ground.

Still, he had a terrible suspicion that he knew where he was; 1700 or thereabouts, whenever the Salem witch trials had taken place.

He dropped his head into his hands. “Great. That’s just fucking splendid.” His breathing sped up, his heart stuttered, and for a time he didn’t think at all.

But panic was an indulgence his instincts didn’t let him linger in for long. Awareness seeped in, and demanded his attention. Firstly, the world was much too blurry. He didn’t have his glasses. Secondly, his grip on his wand was liable to break it. He forced his fingers to relax. The slight movement drew his attention to two other things. A band encircled his finger. It was heavier than the engagement ring he had once worn. The material on his back was silken, almost like liquid; the invisibility cloak wasn’t protecting much of anything from view.

If he was to look closer, he was sure that the wood in his hand would not be _his_ wand, but _The_ Wand, and the ring had a black stone with the Deathly Hallows insignia etched elegantly into it.

He didn’t look, he preferred that small sliver of doubt.

He took a deep breath. When that didn’t do much, he took another. Live in the moment, survive in the now. He nodded resolutely. 

After several measured breaths, he hadn’t calmed, but he’d gotten a grip. He kept things simple. First order of business; he needed some clothes.

Harry didn’t feel very good about stealing, but he had no money, he didn’t know what he was doing, or how long he was staying. He'd never learnt how to conjure clothes because he dressed each morning like a _normal_ person, in garments that wouldn’t vanish after an indeterminable period and at an inconvenient time.

Consider the lesson learnt, really, top of the to-do list right after Objective: feed and water self.

“Damn Death,” he muttered aloud, as he struggled to pull on a strange, horribly uncomfortable and ill-fitting shirt. He shrugged the invisibility cloak on and headed into the heart of town. London. Horses, carts, long gowns, stupid hats, with the dirt-poor littering the streets. Every detail, from the buildings to the sewerage, was alien to the city he knew. “What the hell am I even doing here?”

No response was forthcoming. He glared up at the sky, as if that would accomplish anything. “Just give me so goddamn answers, you bloody bastard!”

“That’s no way to address an abstract entity,” a low, warbled voice spoke up from nowhere. Harry jumped. A bird cawed, and he turned over his shoulder to see a large crow staring intently at him. Straight through his invisibility cloak.

“I’m going crazy.” It would explain so much.

“Going, going, gone,” the bird cackled. A talking crow.

Harry pinched himself. He felt the pain, he didn’t wake up, so there wasn’t much left to do besides wing it. “Um… hi?”

Wide, intelligent dark eyes blinked at him. “I am Archaean.”

Oh, he _so_ couldn’t deal with this. He turned on his heal and briskly walked away.

The flutter of wings and clack of talons followed him down the street. Occasionally, he saw the crow hopping along from the corner of his eye. This game lasted for several minutes before his patience fizzled out. He made it to an empty alley, at least.

“Would you stop following me?” he called, without turning to face it. He was still clinging to the hope that if he ignored it, it would go away.

It gave the bird approximation of a shrug, tilting its head and unfurling its wings slightly. “I feel a bond with you. I have waited, unfulfilled for years, until something lead me here.”

Harry scowled, sensing Death’s hand. “That didn’t happen to be in a breadcrumb trail of carrion, I suppose?”

“Ahk, no. It was magic, fool.”

Harry yelped as the crow swiftly launch itself off the rooftop. He couldn’t see much; just an alarming blur of quick, whirling feathers.

The bird landed on his shoulder, with feet surprisingly sharp and a body unexpectedly heavy. “No, get away! What are you? A needy pet?”

It hissed at him, and puffed up primly, “No. On both accounts.” It snapped its beak perilously close to his ear. He froze, then his shoulders slumped in surrender.

“Fine, come along, who am I to stop you?” He flung his arms up in the air to illustrate his defeat, and just to be a bit of a prick. He didn’t manage to dislodge the bird. Its claws only dug in harder.

“Ow. Um… so are you male or…?” He wouldn’t have thought its grip could get much tighter, but at his words it managed to an element of offence into the piecing pressure. “Female it is, then.”

She glared down at him, loftily. “I will be your companion.”

He cocked an eyebrow and the presumptuousness, “I assume you know who I am?”

“You smell of Death.”

Harry scowled. “Fantastic. So, are crows and ravens going to start flocking to me, now? Because I feel like making a comment about clichés and something tells me you really wouldn’t appreciate it.”

“No. You are mine, and mine only.”

And that was… oddly comforting. For all that he was lost in a strange time or his deranged mind, either way he wasn’t alone any more.

He removed the cloak. He was doomed to be inconspicuous, but he’d bet his life that a friendly crow wouldn’t attract as much attention as one that appeared to be standing on thin air.

…

“Archaean, you’re going to get me arrested,” Harry eyed the suspicious, incredulous, and plain out hostile looks directed their way. “Scratch that. You’re going to get me _killed_.”

Fliers were up by the churches; they displayed witch burnings like prized events. Blame, hatred and hysteria. It had to be this damn century, didn’t it? He couldn’t have been dumped in a more peaceful era in muggle and magical relations, no, that might’ve been _easy_.

He was feeling more anxious by the minute. He couldn’t possibly blend in here. His speech, mannerism – everything betrayed him as unfamiliar, and here and now, that was a capital crime.

“Why don’t you fly ahead. Can you lead me to a magical community?”

She stared him down suspiciously, “You’ll follow?”

“I suggested it, didn’t I?” She wasn’t convinced. He signed. “I’ve nothing better to do.”

…

The wizarding world was much more comforting. It reminded him of the Britain he’d left. Most of the shops were different, but those that had endured, like Ollivanders, were far less rundown.  

Diagon Alley was even more old-fashioned and far less crowded, but at the same time, the atmosphere was more progressive. Shopkeepers flaunted new innovations, he saw fliers bragging about new spells, exploratory potions techniques. Evidently, the age of science and enlightenment had not passed over the magical population entirely. In all, it was less stagnant than the time he’d grown up in. He’d been expecting worse.

The people, though, he was feeling less charitable about. In this political climate, anyone even vaguely associated with muggles risked being completely outcast. So, the Alley was perfectly lovely, but it didn’t want to share with him.

He was vulnerable. He needed news and money, but it wasn’t as if he could just walk into the Potter or Black vault, and he didn’t have a job lined up. To that end, he didn’t know if he even could call himself a Potter. Families counted generations from the past, not every potential branch from the future.

He had none of the things that distinguished people from pavement; no past, no family, no connections, nowhere to go. As long as that was true, he had no way up. He probably couldn’t get lower on the food chain if he tried.

“You do have family.” Archaean was smart. She knew much more than she should, and she was learning more every hour due to some strange connection neither of them really understood. He was lucky to have her, but sometimes he really hated the options she presented him with.

It was a potentially delicate situation. Meeting his ancestors could go wrong in so many ways.

“What if I change the future? There shouldn’t be a Harry Potter here.”

“Shouldn’t there?” Archaean challenged.

He remembered the patronus, then, and finally sat down to a very confusing session of thinking wherein he stubbornly hashed out the unique logic of time travel. He hoped that the future he knew would result from whatever he ended up doing here, because in a way, it had already happened.

There was also the problem of the Hallows. He kind of hoped he’d robbed the objects from their doting owners, because the idea of two sets existing was horrifying. But mostly because he was open to making an anonymous donation just to get rid of them.

He doubted it, but he could dream. On his time off, perhaps; he had work to do.

“Right. Time for some good old misdirecting.”

He applied in what passed as the Ministry for a very painful but flawless blood test. They took one look at his poorly charmed clothes and almost didn’t let him in. To his relief, he took away a family name; the thing that mattered.

He didn’t know where he could find the Potters, so he put his faith in a family he’d had mixed results with in the past, and hoped for the best. He apparated to Grimmauld Place, tried not to cringe, and knocked.

The moment his hand left the wood, a butler opened the door. Harry held up his new certificate before it could slam closed again. He was let inside, and the interior was so different he barely had to pretend he didn’t know the way to the study. A middle-aged man with regal bearing and a painful resemblance to Tonks received him. Harry bowed deeply, though somewhat awkwardly, not knowing quite what to do with his elbows and such. Archaean bobbed her head and remained silent.

Lord Marius Black was stern, stuffy and entitled, but he listened. Harry stuck to facts he could swear by if need be. His father was a Potter, his paternal grandmother was a Black. He hadn’t known his father, or his heritage, and his mother died when he was very young. He was a traveller. He’d spent time abroad, learning magic, and he’d come to meet his family.

Black’s face was blank, though Harry could tell he was not pleased. In Black’s mind, Harry could only be either a bastard, a half-blood, or squib born. Harry knew what conclusion he’d prefer, and that felt like betraying his mother’s memory, but he bore the guilt.

Bastards were occasionally expected, but it was bad form. What went on with a missus was not supposed to have consequences. But Harry had Black and Potter in his blood so even if they thought he was a bastard, he was some important person’s bastard. That was dangerous. The risk of his existence required a response of equal magnitude; nothing less that total endorsement or exile.

They might decide that it would be better if he just disappeared.

He really hoped not.

“I must confer with my extended family, and the Potters.” Harry didn’t miss that he was pointedly excluded from this. “Monty! See this young man to the parlour.”

Harry followed the house elf and met the Black matriarch, Lucretia. She somehow managed to insert criticism on his posture and upbringing, and probe for details, while carrying a conversation that was almost enjoyable.

Desperation proved to be a decent suppressor of Harry’s temper, but Archaean got bored. Harry thought they were done for. To his surprise, Lucretia completely overlooked the comment about the pig and the caterpillar; her frostiness actually lessened by a few degrees. “A powerful familiar reflects a powerful wizard. Ravens are intelligent beasts.”

Archaean twitched. “ _Crow_.”

That was progress, but not enough. Harry was still getting ‘wouldn’t spit on you if you were on fire’ vibes. If Lucretia was aiming to gather information, well, he needed to give it to her, and give it well. It was her impression of him that would be conveyed to Lord Black; he could spruce it up a bit.

Renewed by their small progress, he used some of Hermione’s favourite big words, he bluffed his way through a backstory by drawing on everything he could remember about exotic cultures and the foreign spells he’d learned in the auror corps. When Lady Black started boasting about the Black line hereditary abilities, he took that as a blessing. He played the parseltongue card. The snakes in the tapestries and embroidery perked up, clamouring eagerly towards him. Slightly alarming, but it certainly caught her attention.

Long after Harry was wrung dry by the courteous interrogation, Lord Black returned with Lord William Potter. Harry spotted his own eyebrows and nose on the older stranger’s face. Potter took one glance at him, and pronounced; “He certainly looks the part, Master Black. Perhaps one of the disowned lineages managed to produce a magical heir. It has been known to happen.”

“Both my parents were magical, I do know that much,” Harry said quickly. He’d made a passably good impression, he needed to keep it.

Lucretia was a great help. “He had the officials test his blood when he discovered an affinity for parseltongue,” she supplied nonchalantly, “You can trace the main Potter line back to the Peverells, wasn’t it?”

Lord Black displayed some surprise, at that. “He must have good blood from our family. It has been several decades since parseltongue has resurfaced in our line.”

Unexpectedly, the ice queen smiled slyly, “In any case… my, my, what _has_ your House been up to William, dear?”

“Merlin only knows. At times I wonder whether my brother will form a House of his own.” Harry was surprised to see Lord Potter grin ruefully. So humour _had_ been invented. He’d been beginning to wonder.

…

Lord Potter challenged Harry to a duel to test his skills, supporting his belief that in the past they really did use them to solve everything. To Harry’s eyes, the world was a blur, but it was a manageable one. Debris would’ve been the main concern, but the room they fought in was wide and clear. He could see a rough blob that was enough to aim at, and more importantly he could certainly use to glow of the spells to identify and dodge them. He made do.

William was good, incredibly so. But Harry, until recently, had done this for a living, and he’d been the best. Even Lucretia admitted the he was powerful, though perhaps not fit to be seen in public.

They would teach him, it was decided, and if he could learn to fit in the public eye, he could carry the Potter name. He was adopted on a preliminary basis, on the condition that he never claim inheritance over William’s sons, and he defer to Lord Potter or Lord Black on all matters. They had power over his life, from housing to marriage, and his successes would be theirs. But Harry had shelter, food and clothes. It was more than enough.

…

Over the next few months, Harry came to terms with the fact that the past was _weird_.

For one, Marius Black had an absolutely wicked sense of humour. It snuck up on victims when they were least expecting it and left them spluttering long after it had passed. He was oddly likeable.

Lucretia, however, was clearly related to Bellatrix and Narcisa. Harry sat with her every day of the week, and she wrestled manners into his posture and shoved a strange way of speaking down his throat. She dragged him up to her standards and held him to them by the throat.

Soon after, he met Potter’s eldest son, Rowland; a fanatic follower of the new emerging sport, Quidditch. Needless to say, they got along. Rowland had three younger sisters, all still in Hogwarts. To his surprise, Harry also liked the Black children, all five of them.

It wasn’t that they were different from the stuffy pure-bloods he’d met in his time. In a lot of ways there were even more unbearably conceited, and for a long time they were just as hard to like. He knew he was in trouble once he took the time to know them, and started to find the egos endearing.

Perhaps it was true that hatred could only exist in ignorance, that everyone had something worth knowing. It had been true for Snape, and he had yet to encounter someone as easy to despise as that man.

…

When he met William’s best friend, well… he wasn’t expecting it to be Julius Malfoy, who was as pompous as the ferret he knew, and almost as aggravating.

It made him uncomfortable, at first, to discover that of the inseparable duo, his own ancestor hated muggles far more passionately than Malfoy. Malfoy saw them as ants but valued the privileges of their social circles. William saw no saving graces at all.

Harry asked about this only once. Malfoy explained, very coldly, that William had watched his baby sister dragged through the street, after a neighbour gave baseless accusations out of jealousy. She was killed, not by the fire, but by a farmer who carved her head in with a shovel while their parents attempted a rescue. People had cheered.

Sensing more to the tale, Harry ventured hesitantly; “What happened?”

William watch from the doorway, face shadowed and eyes dark. “I hunted down those responsible.”

“Good,” Harry decided without pause. What could William have done? What the muggles did was condoned, not a crime. No jails would take them, but it didn’t feel right to just let them walk away. In the future, sure, he didn’t think killing people was the answer, but all that stuff about being the better men, that idealism… it didn’t hold up to reality of _now_.

Harry couldn’t stand baseless prejudice, mob mentality and senseless killing. In this time, it wasn’t the Purebloods that were the worst offenders. Their hatred was routed in justice.

He could even understand why this society would hold a collective grudge for the next 300 years. Wizards aged slowly, and forgave even slower. He didn’t think it was helpful or healthy, but he could understand it.

…

Harry couldn’t be auror. The Potters wouldn’t permit him to represent them in an official capacity. He quickly discovered he’d developed a rather limited skillset. There wasn’t much he could do between etiquette lessons to wake up his brain.

He was getting antsy. It’d been a year. He missed his friends. He mourned well-made glasses and treacle tart and bad music.

He tried studying time magic, because that’s what Hermione would have done, but since that field was largely non-existent across the globe, this did not occupy him for long. He tried to write a book. He didn’t have the patience for it.

Luna had spent her summers tagging along with magizoology expeditions; they’d sounded decent. Harry couldn’t find a single one that wasn’t looking for potions ingredients. He set out by himself for a while, but the isolation made his loneliness worse.

He looked into curse breaking briefly, which was unexpectedly interesting, and he suspected it would be even more so if he knew anything about runes or arithmancy. He wished he’d known about that in third year.

There weren’t any dragon reserves to volunteer on. He couldn’t draw to save his life. He’d never understood magical plants as well as muggle ones, despite Neville’s help.

What he wouldn’t give for the joke shop. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a good laugh. The things the twins had come up with. Utter brilliance. He wasn’t half the wizard they were, Harry knew, not as smart, not as creative, not as motivated.

But maybe, he could make a little something?

He started with the ton-tongue toffees; he knew half the recipe, but it took a lot of work to fill in the gaps, Harry ended up learning far more than he’d intended to. He slipped some in the dreaded Aunt Rosetta’s plate, and struggled not to laughed. The image he had in his mind of her turning into a giant mopey canary needed to become a reality.

Somehow, Harry became a spell researcher. Playing with magic in the basement of Potter Manor made him feel closer to the future, to his best friends and his old co-workers, however briefly.

But his predicament showed no sign of changing.

He’d been determined not to jump through Death’s hoops, but he was just about ready to give in. “What am I supposed to do, Archaean?”

“Death said you didn’t have to do anything.”

“But surely there’s something! Some girls summoned Death and he sent me. Am I meant to stop them? The muggle conflict is only going to get worse once Salem completely loses it.”

“Maybe you are here because that is all the timeline needs to progress to the future. You don’t have to aim for a goal, just live.”

Live. Right. “I half blew myself up last week.” Harry was beginning to doubt that he could die if he tried.

“I told you to seal away the powder before you tried that spell.”

…

Years passed. Harry watched Diagon Alley turn into a well-established central hub of activity.

The Ministry as he knew it formed its foundations, aiming to reinforce the Stature of Secrecy legislation to ensure that the witch burnings could never happen again.

Wizards still lived scattered amongst muggles, but communities were coming together as magical people drifted apart from the other, harsher world. It became fashionable to have no contact whatsoever.

The Blacks didn’t even consider moving. The house had been built by the first Blacks half a millennium ago. They were above fashion, Marius informed his family pretentiously.

After the pronouncement, Harry scoured the Potter, Black and Malfoy libraries and he devilled into warding. He worked with Marius on Grimmauld place, over the years building up the infamous fortifications.

Paranoia, Sirius had called it. Granted. They went a little overboard. But they would be safe.

It was that way for nine years. He was successful and content. He had a family – it wasn’t the one he’d imagined, but they cared for him and he for them.

Of course, it couldn’t last.

…

The next jump landed him in 1879. He was woken in the middle of the night, skipped the ghostly purgatory, and got dropped into the middle of a sacrificial summoning circle with only Archaean on his shoulder and the Hallows with his person.

He got out of there, quick smart.

Europe was chaos, wars were brewing, so he didn’t stick around. He’d just gotten his feet under him, only to have the ground unexpectedly torn away again. Harry didn’t dare repeat that for a while.

Harry and Archaean stay in that time for a year before another summoning pulled him into 1951 and, after five years, backwards into 1910.

He actively tried to stop it. He imagined, sometimes, getting to the 70’s and defeating Voldemort, fixing his life before it could go wrong, or better yet, catching up with the early 21st century and being able to stay there. He wanted to be ready, if that happened, so he dedicated his time to learning.

He didn’t want to know what would happen if he missed his chance. He might not live to visit twice. He’d once thought that he’d grow old with Ron and Hermione, and they’d pester the younger generation about stories from the old days.

But he’d started going grey at 30, without Ron to tease him. His face grew leaner, the creases deeper without Hermione to remind him to smile. That distant idea of a woman to love and settle down with was never realised, but Harry could imagine worse things.

He held it close to his chest – a deep fear that he’d wither and fall apart before he made it back, without even a chance to see them again.

He let it drive him.

Harry moved around, from Australia to Haiti, and exchanged knowledge with scholars and shamans. Some years, he learnt magic, but other times he integrated with muggles. He studied their mythology, and soon became an expert on everything about personifications of Death. Roman, Egyptian, Norse, Christian, Hindu – nothing helped him much.

What wasn’t rubbish, seemed bizarrely like memories. He found traces of himself in old stories. Ones he’d read _before_ this whole mess, but had not recognised back then.

The idea of deliberately causing change and undoing all of this by killing Voldemort, was ludicrous, and he knew it.

…

He was woken by an insistent tug moments before the world was spinning away. As was his custom, after negligently stunning the sinister figures who’d tried to summoned death, Harry apparated to London.

It was different.

Phones were bigger, flatter, and absolutely everywhere. The cars were sleeker, the fashion slightly scary, the buildings a little taller. It hadn’t been so hard to find a newspaper since the seventeenth century. They said it was October, 2018.

Ron and Hermione weren’t living in the flat they’d proudly bought together in 1998. After traumatising and profusely apologising to the old lady who did, Harry tried the Burrow. He scared the old lady there, too. Mrs Weasley hit him with a frying pan, which was only mostly an accident, then hugged him half to death and scolded him for worrying her.

They called a whole Weasley congregation. From their view, he’d vanished, and now sixteen years later, just as miraculously reappeared. The air was charged with the hurt and blame of his disappearance – the questions had festered for years, and now that he was back, alive all along, they were asking _why_.

“Why did you stay away?” It felt like an accusation. 

“Well…” It wasn’t a short story, and he wasn’t very good at telling it, but over the course of the evening his audience progressed from confused to disbelieving, straight on through to stubbornly determined.

“If I can’t stop it, I’m going to jump again.”

Hermione tackled the problem by sinking her teeth into some books, and Ron proposed a drink. Some things never changed.

Other things had. His best friends were married, they’d had _kids_. So had Bill and Fleur, George and Angelina, and almost everyone else he knew. He met Victoire that afternoon, and he couldn’t wait until the Hogwarts term finished to meet the rest.

He did the math, he came up with a glaring irregularity.

“Where is Teddy?” Harry saw the looks they exchanged, and he knew.

It was a weak heart. Teddy had been born with it. The worst part was that it was completely curable, if they’d caught it early enough, but no one had noticed. The symptoms had been explained away. If his skin was too pale, it was a metamorphmagus phase. If Teddy had been less energetic than the other children, he was respectful of his elderly grandma. When he started fainting, they noticed, but by then it was already too late; the healers could only slow the progress and make his last years as comfortable as possible.

Harry mourned for how time had moved on without him, and for his Godson, so far beyond his reach.

…

Ron and Hermione were as relieved to see him as he was them, but they had the weight of a decade and a half of vastly different experience between them. They’d spent more of their lives apart than together.

It became apparent that Harry couldn’t just settle back into his niche, it’d long ago closed up and scarred over.

They tried. Merlin, did they try.

“You have a… raven? You’re really playing up the stereotype, mate,” Ron goaded with a smile.

Harry blinked. The automatic response that would’ve come to mind years ago was glaringly absent. Hogwarts seemed so far behind them now. “Crow, and yes, it’s getting old. We make appearances at summonings every so often and, a few hundred years of repetition later, suddenly we have a pop culture.”

Ron’s smile turned strained and confused. Harry dropped it, rather than explain.

Hermione bought tickets to a concert not much later. Harry supposed she was worried. Since he’d arrived, he’d only shown his face outside of the library to plot a raid on the Department of Mysteries.

Harry took the ticket reluctantly, and read the gaudy, 70s style writing. “Star-lord?”

“Yes, Peter Quill. Muggles call him the Guardian of Good Music. For good reason, too. You can be grateful you missed what the technology revolution did to songs in the last decade!” She shuddered theatrically, and then almost immediately clapped he hands to her mouth with more honest horror. “Oh, I’m sorry, Harry.”

As if he was desperate, as the reminder would break him. They couldn’t fathom that he’d seen much, much worse.

His smile hurt, just a little. “Don’t worry about it.”

…

“You should’ve told me you still needed glasses! I thought you’d had them corrected.”

Harry looked at Hermione incredulously. “When would I’ve done that? Muggles didn’t have laser surgery in the 1900s. Even wizards didn’t have good glasses until recently. I suppose I just got used to it.”

Muggle doctors did their science thing, and he wound up seeing the world more clearly than he ever had. Merlin, he’d forgotten how detailed it all was. It was almost beautiful.

…

Harry’s hopes faded. He’d been buoyed up, relieved by the knowledge that Hermione was there, helping him. Answers had always tended to fall into place under her ministrations.

But not this time. There was no pattern to the jumps, and no hint of how to stop them.

What Harry remembered, and what Hermione remembered of their childhood, showed almost no disparities – Harry hadn’t changed time. They recalled the same legends about grim reapers, mythology, whatever. Harry could add a few more details and point out where the authors exercised creative licence, but the stories themselves hadn’t changed. Harry was embedded in history. It seemed as if he’d always been there.

Hermione had said, once, that terrible things happened to wizards who meddled with time. As they learnt together, more became clear.

“The universe compensates. There is some fundamental understanding that you cannot kill your grandfather; no matter how hard you try, you will always miss or experience an unfortunate accident. People can’t erase themselves before they’ve travelled back in time, but they can die while travelling. Paradoxes can't exist, so they won’t. Existence protects itself. That must be what usually kills people, and I think it’s also why you’re stuck.”

Harry thought about that. He decided, ruefully, that they might’ve missed the mark with the ‘power he knows not’. Someone had to survive Voldemort, grow up, have the Hallows fall into his lap, and make history.

Prophecy wasn’t complicated at all, he realised bitterly, the universe was an open book. He remembered, then, what Death had revealed. Fate and time are the same concept viewed from different perspective.

He never stood a chance. He, plainly, couldn’t arrange things to never become the Master of Death. It had happened, and it always would.

It was beginning to sound inescapable. “We just need more time,” Hermione stubbornly repeated whenever she saw his optimism flagging.

Harry had been there for six years. Most of his visits didn’t last that long. He didn’t expect to be around much longer. “I won’t stay away forever, some day I’ll come around again,” he replied each time, and tried to believe it.


	2. Constant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end of the beginning

_Definition: constant_

_(Adjective) ever present_

_always present and available; remaining the same over a period of time._

_(Adjective) happening or done repeatedly_

_occurring or made again and again_

_(Noun) something unchanging_

_an object, quality, or fact that is invariable or ever present; quantity with fixed value or unvarying property_

… 

Harry jumped and time ebbed and flowed around him. In a way, his worst fears were realised. He aged until his skin was papery, his joins worked as barometers and he needed a pensive to keep his thoughts straight. One jump tore his frail body apart. He met Death with a soft smile, having lived his long and interesting life, ready to see his loved ones again.

Death chewed him up and spat him back out in the Spanish Inquisition. Seventeen, reset to the age it all began. Harry wasn’t invulnerable, he was just immortal.

He grew to accept that he was doomed to hopscotch through space-time for eternity. He quickly learned to use glamours or age potions to keep himself looking a consistent age – something near forty – to avoid any more awkward encounters with people he had known on previous loops.

Sprouting myths of a fountain of youth was definitely an experience that did not bare repeating.

But it wasn’t all bad, so he made the most of it. He enjoyed living, even though it bruised him each time he was torn away, sometimes to return after having aged decades only to find he was the wrong shape to fit back into the life he’d made before.

He saw history unfold because although Death was rarely welcome, it was often called upon. It was not a surprise, then, that he spent most of his time around periods of strife or strong religious fervour. He would jump forward until around 2070, then loop back, usually to the 1300s, before going forward again, randomly landing in each century at least once. Rinse, repeat.

He rarely went past 2100. His only visit to 2231, he’s pretty sure, was an accident. People had become a more rational species, and most no longer believed that Death was something that could be summoned. He took the opportunity to gather another perspective; scientists had figured out time travel by then. Unfortunately, science had moved on so phenomenally since the 21st century that he spent seven years in the basic courses before he even understood the trivial stuff, like Hawking radiation. If a solution was there, he never knew – time moved him on before he could find it.

That was the first moment he was torn between breaking down or flinging green light at things until he felt better, but it wasn’t the last.

Once, he woke after celebrating the end of a war in Athens, having lost about thirty-six hours of memory to an obvious cause. Archaean informed him that he’d bestowed the Hallows on three brothers. At the time, he was so hammered he couldn’t stand without propping himself up with a stick, so it was no surprise he’d considered walking across a bridge so remarkable. At that blood alcohol level, the gift of mobility must’ve seemed _hilarious_.

The Hallows turned up again the next day. Somehow. All while two out of three started playing hot potato with the human race. He didn’t understand the mechanics of it, but in the end, he didn’t need to, because magic has always taken things such as the laws of physics and common sense to be trivialities, and it wasn’t going to make an exception for him.

Sometimes he wished it would, however.

He tried to warn Andromeda about the condition Teddy would develop. He wrote notes, he informed people in person, he charmed and blackmailed healers into making a standing appointment. They never caught it in time.

Influence? What a laughable idea. If there was anything Harry came to realise, it was that influence was an illusion. On dark days, he would go so far as to say _free will_ was an illusion, after all, what use is the ability to pick and choose for puppets on some preordained path? A concession. A platitude. A small torture.

In the timeline, Teddy died. No matter what events led up that even, the outcome was an early, unavoidable death.

Harry knew this. It almost stopped him from trying. But he wasn’t the kind to submit to impossible odds or give into despair, and age had not changed that much. He couldn’t say, but he could visit. Every once in a while, Harry returned to that brief window of time and he got to know his Godson, a few years at a time.

The timeline was constant in both directions. He was the fluid one, popping up the way he did. And yet, Harry never ran into another version of himself. By the time he realised that oddity, he’d visited most decades, and many of his trips had overlapped. There _should_ have been at least one Harry, at different ages, in just about every moment of human civilisation.

 _Simultaneously_.

What’s more, he could imagine a time where he’d completed many more loops, until there was an infinite number of Harrys in any given time.

That boggled his mind, but there were two Harrys in the original 1993 when he rescued Sirius, so the same concept should hold true. Except it didn’t. He remembered exactly where he was on the 17th of June, 1910, when he was 47 years old. By the time he’d experienced over 300 years, he looked and he didn’t find. There was no 47-year-old Harry Potter anywhere.

He was _so_ confused.

…

Then, one time, it was different.

Harry appeared in an ancient war room. Nothing unusual. In his experience, quite a few leaders believed that enacting a summoning ritual for Death sent a good message to the troops. Something bothered him, however, and it was so unusual that it took him a long moment to pinpoint it.

These people hadn’t summoned him. They argued so fervently that no one even noticed his arrival.

“Unhand it! Now! I will endure no more of this insubordination!”

Three older, grizzled men stood around a small blue cube emitting some kind of glow. It accented their angry snarls. The speaker was white haired, but far from frail, in finely crafted golden armour. His grip tightened around a forked spear.

“Obey, Dagr. There will be no warnings on this matter,” the second, a warrior, pointedly lay a hand on his sword.

“You risk us all. We cannot keep the Tesseract here, let me place it in the Vanaheim vaults.”

“No! This is my final word on the matter,” the sparkly one declared.

Dagr bowed shallowly and swooped out.

The leader watched him go. “He has had too much contact with it, Tyr. The power has touched his mind. I fear what he will attempt.”

“You will move it?”

“I must. He is not wrong. It is too dangerous to remain in our sight. Prepare your best men. After Dagr acts, deliver the Tesseract to me and announce to all that it has been lost.”

“Of course, Allfather.” Then they were alone in the room. Harry shifted his feet on the chilly floor.

“Death.”

Shit. Awkward. Harry crossed the room, into the light, warily.

The Allfather turned to meet him, face impassive despite Harry’s sudden, bare arsed presence in what appeared to be a highly confidential meeting. Then an eyebrow rose. “Ah, merely one of his omens, and a Midguardian at that. I was expecting your master.” His face fell into weariness, the kind that only comes from experience and suffering, “Death always follows the infinity stones.”

That meant exactly nothing to him. “Where am I?”

“Asgard.”

…

The Allfather, Odin, was kept busy with the heightened tension in his court. Asgard was the place of his power, the seat of the Nine Realms. These Realms, this _galactic scale empire_ was only one of many, and just so happened to include the little backwater world called Earth. Harry felt very small, all of a sudden.

Odin would escort Harry back to Earth within the week, which was a strange errand for an emperor to run, but it wasn’t Harry’s call. In the meantime, there was a banquet held in his honour. Harry suspected that such a thing wasn’t uncommon; the Asgardians seemed the kind to take any excuse to make noise and get smashed.

Ordinarily, Harry would approve enthusiastically, he loved a good party. But most of the people, if they did deign to acknowledge him, did so only to satisfy the lowest levels of curiosity. He got the impression that they weren’t deliberately snubbing him, which almost certainly would have been the case if more of them recognised him as a mere Midguardian. But as it was, the backbone of their society was entirely built on simple principle values: physical strength, direct confrontation and a high kill count.

Harry approached 6 foot from the wrong end of the scale, and at best he could be described as lithe. He was strong in his own right, at least until he passed fifty, but around the Asgardians he felt dwarfed by muscles and liable to break if they got too affectionate. He carried no steel, and although he had a healthy appreciation for fighting things, he did it at a distance. By way of a wand. To the warriors, that seemed about as exciting as extreme knitting.

Crows, though, turned out to be slightly revered. They treated Archaean with respect and attention, but as they craned their necks down to meet Harry’s eyes, they habitually concluded that he could never amount to much.

He felt like a snake in the lion’s den, even more than he’d even been in Gryffindor.

On the upside, he was largely left to his own devices. After the first few hours, when it became apparent that he wouldn’t be missed, Harry set off to peruse the library – it seemed like the kind of place that might contain an explanation to his ongoing problem.

If only he could read the language. He’d picked up a few on his way, but Old Norse hadn’t been high on the list. It was similar to Old English, in much the same way modern English was similar to modern German. Not very helpful.

He flicked, frustrated, through the delicate tomes, partly thankful that the Asgardians were keen on picture books, but for the most part all he found was frustration as he got tantalising glimpses of things that _might_ be answers.  

He stumbled through a record of Asgardians that were legendary in their own right, and he paused. He recognised Hela. Previously, he’d assumed Hela to be another one of his various appearances in mythology and religion. It was a sore point with him, as Hela was always portrayed as a woman. If Harry had to suffer the indignity of time travelling naked, he’d liked to think that one thing, at least, would be _obvious_.

On Earth, representations of her seem to have been influenced by the more traditional grim reaper, but in Asgard things hadn’t been filtered through time and mortal minds, and it became clear that she was a totally different representation of Death.

Once he got over his relief, the wider implications excited him.

He asked (begged) a darkhaired boy to assist him. The child was, mercifully, much more subdued than the party goers, and helped him through the passage with a resolve Harry hadn’t seen since Hermione and with intelligence beyond all bar Luna. The combined traits were staggering, especially because the child basked in Harry’s attention with slight awe. It was as wonderful rush, Harry knew from experience, to feel needed in a world that was determined to make you feel useless.

When they finished, the boy hesitated to leave. Grinning slightly, Harry returned the favour. He started with a story, not of big warriors being brave, because Harry was sure the kid had heard plenty of those, but of a skinny average person that was, above all, hardworking and kind, with a passion for the monsters the world hated; a person who didn’t set out to change the world, but loved it so much that he managed it anyway.

Harry wasn’t surprised when the embellished tale of his friend Newt got derailed, and they ended up debating theoretical applications of transfiguration instead.

…

Odin refused to take Harry to visit Hela. He seemed surprised that the wizard had heard of her, as the Asgardian had decreed her to be forgotten.

Harry suspected the library was not used much.

The King had forbidden anyone from seeking her out, and tried the same with Harry, but he must’ve seen the stubborn set of Harry’s shoulders and tried a more persuasive tactic. Odin warning him about mortal peril, which was not much more convincing, and world ending consequences, and that one did do the trick.

In the end, Harry wasn’t too put out, because to be extra sure the wizard had no reason to seek Hela out, Odin saw fit to answer the questions himself.

“There are countless Omens, at least as many as there are civilisations in the stars. Hela is the God of Death. She draws here strength from Asgard like you draw your strength from Midgard. She is a master of magic, but she does not walk through time as you do.”

Harry listened raptly.

“Her headdress was gifted to her by Death for her feats in battle. Like you, Death also provided her with a companion to guide her path. But in time she rejected the hound, Garm. She rebelled against her responsibilities and remade them in her cruel vision. Garm was not powerful enough in her mind. Now he is Fenrir; powerful to be certain, but naught but a mindless beast. Separating them was the only way to subdue her.”

“Why did that work?”

“Fenrir is her link to Death, he contains a portion of Death’s power. As does Archaean.”

“Huh,” well that bore thinking about. “What were her responsibilities?”

“To claim all – the old, the young, the worthy, the disgraced. She still kills indiscriminately, but she guides only those who will serve her. Pray you never meet.”

…

Odin hid the Tesseract on Earth in 1476, but never mind that, Harry was _delighted_. He apparated to Italy after a farewell that was probably too brief to be strictly polite and he may just have irritated an all-powerful being in his haste (but it would hardly be the first time).

He’d been in 1472 recently enough to prevent old friendships becoming uncomfortable, and in that year, he’d met a delightful young genius that he could never spend too much time with.

Harry knocked impatiently and there was a muffled curse from a voice he didn’t recognise. Harry remembered enough Italian to recognise a creative mix of threats and bribes not to open the door.

It opened. There was paint on his fingers, a brush in his hand, and the face Harry saw was no different from the one he remembered, save for the devilish tilt to the other man’s grin.

“Da Vinci, what _have_ you gotten up to since I’ve been gone?” Harry stumbled over the language for a moment.

Leonardo took no note of his questionable pronunciation and pulled him into a hug, “Harry, Archaean, it is fantastic to see you both!”

The young man blinked, taking in the Asgardian garb Harry was still decked out in. “Where have you been?”

“Eh, abroad. Really, very far abroad,” he rubbed his neck sheepishly, pulling at the tight collar.

Leonardo brushed the matter aside. Harry did not assume for a moment that he was off the hook. Da Vinci had a mind like a trap and more than enough curiosity to bait it: doubtlessly, the questions would be thoroughly examined when he wasn’t quite so excited.

“Come in, come in, there is someone you must meet!”

Harry was happy to be dragged into the inventor’s office. It was cluttered, as always, and Archaean immediately went off to examine Leonardo’s latest flying model. Honestly, you get those two started on aerodynamics…

Beneath the window was an easel and a model. At first, Harry mistook him for a girl, but the man was dressed in a dark woman’s gown and makeup, so Harry figured he could be forgiven.

The man let out an enraged hiss and more scathing words were sure to follow, but Leonardo interrupted with frightening intensity. “No, strike your pose.” Once his workplace was once again under control, he introduced them.

“Harry, this is a good friend of mine, Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Ezio, this is Harry Potter, the traveller I told you about.”

They assessed each other and came away satisfied. Ezio’s hostility lifted slightly, probably because Harry managed to maintain a straight face. It helped that there was a sobering amount of sharp pointy things in the room, and Ezio had muscles and scars that made Harry’s sensibility kick in.

“For the record, this is entirely _his_ fault,” Ezio gestured to da Vinci with a glare. 

“Ah, this is the least you could do. You will save me a lot of trouble. Now smile.”

Ezio’s smile promised pain, but Leonardo was a good artist – he softened that out quite nicely.

“We will never speak of this again,” Ezio declared darkly, hours later, once he had shucked the dress.

Leonardo sniffed. “Just for that, I am going to turn it into a masterpiece someday.”

…

The next time Harry was in modern France, he visited the Louvre. He stood before the Mona Lisa and the likeness of a young man who grew to be the most infamous assassin that history forgot. In drag.

Harry couldn’t help it. He cackled until the guards escorted him out.

…

Harry moved around. Each time he skipped, he'd settle down where the excitement was happening, so as not the get bored. He tended to stick to England because no matter the time period, the dialects were usually rooted in something he could understand. He picked up several languages by necessity in his first century, but once he caved and learned Latin, his eyes really opened.

He watched people build the Colossus of Rhodes, the Gardens of Babylon, the Eifel Tower. He was there when the Romans reached Britain. He pranked Augustus, because that was something even the Weasley twins couldn’t boast, and he was still a little bitter about the legionnaire who once stuck a sword through him around 400 AD.

He was with the Egyptians when they build the pyramids. Watching the sorcerers weaving a blanket of magical protections and giving the curses an infantile sentience of their own was breathtaking _._ Bill would have loved to see it, and that thought gave him an idea.

Harry couldn’t take anything with him, but magic could preserve things for centuries. Harry had never skipped more than that far.

For the next loop, he filled books with anything and everything. A newspaper clipping of the one time the Cannons actually won the league. A feather from a Snidget for Luna. Many obscure and forgotten spells that Hermione, Bill and the Twins would appreciate. Every few weeks he deposited them in a certain location and refreshed his preservation charms. Whenever he jumped, they remained, a little more worn down, but salvageable. It gave him something to do, and something to look forward to.

Once he caught up to 1500 again, he showed da Vinic building plans from impossible structures and they fawned over them together. In 1703 he gave Marius Black the schematics for even more powerful wards. He showed his samples and descriptions of magical beasts with Newt in 1930. More years passed, more knowledge was preserved and shared.

…

He was eating when the distinctly unsettling feeling came over him. Harry paused, pasta dangling from his fork, trying to pinpoint the sudden change.

The room disappeared from view and travelling was sensation he was used to, but this time it jarred him. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something was definitely off.

He found himself in a large room on a plane, wherein the two other beings were intently focused on a familiar blue cube. The Tesseract was in the hand of a red man, and it was active in a way that Harry had never seen before. Phenomenal power pooled in the roof of the plane until some threshold was passed – magic snapped, and the roof turned into a window, displaying the galaxies and stars of some unknown corner of the universe.

It was no illusion, but a rift, a portal. The vacuum immediately depressurised the cabin, and in some corner of his mind Harry was relieved that enough air was flowing in through giant holes in the fuselage to prevent everything from immediately being sucked into space. The part of his brain delirious from lack of breath was responsible for that; the air was so thin that it felt like it was being sucked from his lungs, there wasn’t enough oxygen going to his brain, he couldn’t _think_ –

The Tesseract energy sucked the red guy up and deposited him who knows where, before the portal collapsed and it was all Harry could do to weather the storm. He heard an outraged squawk, and he gasped a response, but he couldn’t see Archaean anywhere. Everything was moving too fast.

The other man, in blue and white, was up in an instant, before Harry even think about catching his breath. He dropping into a fighting stance and threw a shield at him; it was spinning, hypnotising ––

It was so unbelievably cold. The icy daggers sliced into his bones and grabbed hold. They reached his mind and pulled him into darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So… yeah, this is the end of The Beginning. The prelude really, the story starts now.
> 
> Also, I apologise for teasing (but not really), I’m not going to mix all of Assassin’s Creed in here as well, that little cameo was just my bad sense of humour getting away from me.
> 
> Anyway, I’m curious: what Marvel characters do you want to see feature prominently? Heroes, antiheroes, villains? All past and future Marvel films are open.


	3. Transcend

_Definition: Transcend (Verb)_

  1. _go beyond limit_



_to go beyond a limit or range, e.g. of thought or belief_

  1. _surpass something_



_in quality or achievement_

  1. _be independent of world_



_to exist above and apart_

…

Harry was vaguely aware of sensations – voices, pressure, pain, and burning cold, _cold_ , **_cold…_** until, to his relief, he was suddenly in a place where he could feel nothing but the soft air on his skin and the fog clearing from his head.

Interim was the same as always, Harry decided. It’d been a while since he’d dropped in. He hadn’t died in some time.

Death, though, was smiling when he appeared, and _that_ was as unusual as it was disturbing. It wasn’t a gentle smile; no, there was something sharp about that glee.

“I admit, I had hoped this would happen. It was never a certainty,” Death murmured.

“I thought everything was certain.”

“Once a path is committed to, the world follows and does not stray. But before that heading is set, one might encounter a crossroad, an… _opportunity_.”

Harry paced warily. “What happened, exactly? I remember being knocked out.”

“The plane crashed. It sunk into the ocean and froze, your body along with it. For sixty-seven of years, you were in that ice.”

Harry’s breath caught in his chest. He usually traversed millennia in that amount of time. “Bloody hell. Would you care to tell me, exactly, why my misfortune has you so chipper?”

“A pocket of time,” Death mused, suddenly grinning scarily. “Time moves regardless of opinion or effort, moving forward from Order to Chaos, from energy to heat. But it is not linear; entropy can decrease locally so sometimes going forwards entails a loop into the temporal past. It adjusts to correct itself using you, though me. You go back to where ever you are required, to keep the future as you know it.”

Harry was not impressed. “I realised. On my own. You know, all those years where you just threw me to the wolves.” Well, more or less. He had suspected something similar, at least.

Harry got the impression Death was rolling his eyes, though the being’s expression didn’t flicker. “If time is a river, you can drop a boulder, but it will be worn down until the flow is amended, because you, the river’s embankments, were infallible. We maintain the universe as it is by bowing to our nature; we serve our existence by existing.”

Harry was uneasy. The explanations, the fanfare – Death was never so chatty, it was almost as if he was gloating.

“What an unfortunate loophole.” And that sarcasm, there, was _definitely_ triumphant. “You were dead in all the ways that physically matter, but as my herald you cannot truly pass on. To go beyond Death is to go beyond Eternity; we are inexorably linked. You froze in a pocket of time, and time moved on without you. The river burst its banks. For seventy years. Forever. Certainly, long enough to carve _new_ channels.”

Harry couldn’t breathe.

“Causality was broken: Fate holds no power, Eternity has been dealt a mighty blow. The universal balance collapsed,” Death said as if that was a _good_ thing.

Well shit, Harry thought, but the sensations were pouring back and the mist was fading. The last impression Harry got was of Death’s toothy smile as he said; “I look forward to change. Finally, things will be more interesting.”

…

It was so cold. There was heaviness in his lungs. His arms wouldn’t move. Magic was working hard to reverse the damage, to the point where it exhausted him more than he could handle. He drifted.

A zip split the world open and the light flooded in, burning him, leaving him mostly blind. He couldn’t blink if he tried.

“No sir, I’ve never seen him before.” The voice reminded him of frisbees, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why. Harry recognised that tone, so he knew the man, but the man didn’t know him. The dichotomy of information got his attention; no one _forgot_ him.

“He was in the main cabin with you, slightly behind and above.” Another man, this one a stranger. American, speaking modern English for lack of a better term.

“The ship was empty; the Red Skull was the last on board. Maybe your man was an explorer that came along later?”

“So we would assume. We’ve dated the corpse: the state of tissue damage puts his death at around fifty years ago. He drowned. But this is the state we found him in – one thin cloak, one stone ring, no other belongings.”

The darkness closed in one click at a time. Ah, body bag. He recognised it now, and he wanted to groan; those were a _nightmare_ to open from the inside. But the darkness was nice.

His mind wavered, the conversation moved beyond his capacity to listen. An indeterminable amount of time later, a hand settled on his torso. It was gentle, barely there, but his chest was having enough trouble rising under its own weight so he definitely noticed the addition of more.

The light returned, the noise escalated beyond reasonable levels, Harry’s arm was wrenched, a hand squeezed his wrist. His muscles screamed at the movement, he wanted to slap the bastard.

“Get me a doctor.”

Oh, bugger it.

That was not going to be a fun talk.

The tell-tale tug came, for once at an opportune moment, but on top of everything else that was too much pain for anyone to reasonably manage. He dropped into unconsciousness.

…

However uncomfortable that shelf and bag had been, it was feathers and rose petals compared to collapsing on his back in the sand. Harry’s mouth froze open in a silent scream, the air wouldn’t leave.

“Death, I am your humble servant!”

He blinked, and his eyelids scrapped over what felt like gravel. No wonder he couldn’t see.  His chest rose and fell and air rattled around in a few pitiful moans that sounded a lot like “ _Fuck_ ” and “ _You_ ”.

He ignored the sycophant, his attention fell on the prone ball of feathers he could feel on his chest. “Archaean.”

His hands shook with the effort of holding them aloft, he stroked her gently. Her feathers were bent; that was wrong. She always kept them so neat. Her heart was beating very quickly.

“Hey there, you’re ok.” His fingers combed through the plumage on her neck, her back. He didn’t feel any damage. “You’ll be alright,” he promised himself.

Tug. Blink.

Harry was deposited on his feet, and he swayed. He had limited resources available for balance, since he was cradling the crow to his chest.

His knees hit the dirt and, yeah, that was going to leave a mark, but it hurt no more than the rest of him.

He bent over her, sheltering the bird from whatever might be around them. Colour was beginning to leak into the light and dark gradient he could perceive.

“My Lord!”

“Shut up!” he roared.

Magic, yes. Healing. That would be a treat. Where was the wand? His hands were full of feathers, he was reluctant to move. But the wand –

The pull, and then there was noise all around him. A riot, a rally, maybe, there was copious cheering and praying; he put his bet on zealous cult number 34.

His eyes stung and he blinked rapidly – they weren’t so dry anymore. The blurs started to form distinguishable shapes.

He shuffled and his feet slipped on the smooth surface. It was slick with something warm and dark. His knees, again. Merlin _why_ the knees? He didn’t drop the wand this time, it was nestled up against his companion’s wing.

He knew that coppery smell, and suddenly the mysterious pile of beige and brown beside him became startlingly clear. Sacrifices.

The cultists were dancing in blood, praising their cleverness, celebrating the grand accomplishment they’d paid for with unnecessary pain that wasn’t even their own.

“Death bows to me, my disciples! We go forth, our enemies will know our might!” A woman swanned around the room, speaking an old French dialect. She had a cruel face.

Harry attracted a certain type of people. The desperate, the clever, the dredges of humanity, the type of crazy a person must be if intentionally seeking out Death personified. The faces change, but it was always the same type of idiot. They were the kind of people who craved the attention of whatever vengeful and mighty gods they believed in, yet didn’t have the nuance to temper that urge with the concern that something grumpy and powerful _might actually answer_.

These guys at least had the forethought to restrain his power, but not for the right reasons – the control freaks were buoyed up on their own narcissism. They lacked fear, and without the paranoia for the minute details, they missed anything that might have given him pause. The Egyptians taught him how to find the smallest hole in the most airtight plan. In all his years, he’d never actually needed to go to that much trouble.

They’d warded against escape, deception, betrayal – and those were just the runes in front of him. It was an airtight casing on his skin, almost. So only a _slightly_ higher standard of idiot than usual.

Megalomaniacs were never thorough enough. For one, they never took the time to clean up the blood. They revelled in the power, the ambiance – and forgot that they’d left said power around where anyone could tap into it.

He drew in the fluid, and rune by rune, the restraints fell away. When his magic was free, the idiot was still preaching. Harry turned his wand on Archaeon. “Rennervate.”

She twitched, stunned, like the time she’d flown into a window.

“Come on girl, what hurts?” His whispers were drowned out by the feverous chanting. It was getting on his last nerve.

She flopped gracelessly, wings and legs and head moving with little coordination. Worriedly, Harry did what he could for her head and busied himself with patching up her feathers while she regained her faculties.

He knew the moment she did. “Stop that,” she bit him. “You’re making a mess.”

The crow rolled onto her stomach and stood shakily. She hopped to his head, a quiet promise that she’d be fine. Harry’s shoulders lightened with relief.  

More shouting. Dear Merlin could they not see he was busy? “Death! Death! Death!”

Harry sighed. “If you insist.”

He stood – the smoothest motion he’d managed since waking – and spells rained from his lips.

There was more a lot more blood outside of bodies before he was finished and the leader cowered up at him. “This – this isn’t what He promised…”

“I’m sorry, were you expecting something else?”

“I – I, but –” Her last words.

He levelled the wand with her eyes. “You asked for death. I’m delivering.”

Her body fell, and Harry ignored it. Instead, he spelled the blood off the invisibility cloak, lest it become annoyingly conspicuous, and muttered sourly. “Yeah the service isn’t what it used to be. The service got callous after he saw too much of this shit. We now free-lance in garbage removal. You may leave your complains with freaky greeting mist.”

Apart from his knees, he felt much better. He suddenly wanted to get far from that room. He only got halfway to the door.

Heave. Harry groaned.

A blizzard. No, a battleground. Blue giants and gold Asgardians, having it out in what, to Harry, seemed less like a storm and more like an ice age.

He’d never been so cold. Harry felt his balls roll up and die.

“Death, Hela. Please, take me. No more. If it’s not you it’s _them_ , please, don’t let me fall to them.”

It was dark, there was a lot of snow swirling between Harry and the prone man before him, he couldn’t tell which side of the battle he might hail from. 

Yank.

Warehouse full of idiots, but pleasantly temperate.

Jerk.  

Restaurant. Harry looked around, bewildered. Of all the times and places… the main course, seriously?

“Oh, I’ll have the lobster carbonara,” a dolled-up girl ordered without looking away from the man opposite her, staring blindly to eyes that said he’d rather lick an electrical socket than finish the date with this creature.

Archaeon cackled.

Tug.

“I missed something,” the crow suspected.

“Apparently we have 70 years of skipping to make up for.” Harry thought that made sense, except for how it didn’t and he was sure that wasn’t how this omen business worked.

Pull.

This time a hospital ward; a newly superstitious man praying for god, magic, _anyone_ to save his hands.

The tug was like a slap.

Enough.

A punch in the gut.

Just stop. Merlin, he wanted to rest.

He didn’t think he could take much more.

He wondered what would happen if _he_ prayed for Death. That might throw a wrench into things. He was tempted.

And then he was in hell. A few people were herded like sheep between giant silver robots and there was desolation as far as he could see. Most of them were crying, several of them could hardly move, and as Harry caught his breath, one of them was killed with no more care than an insect. They were dirty and desperate and they prayed for release – the kind of release that one might seek Death for.

It cannot be right.

The robots turned on him and he apparated to London, landing on rocky uneven ground in the same terrible state as the scene he’d left. The air was almost too hot to bear. Scotland was the same. On the other size of the world, Australia was even worse. He landed in the ocean when he tried for Brisbane and something in the water burned like acid. The skyscrapers rose from the waves like broken, worn pylons.

But the architecture was clear; Archaeon was the expert but Harry wasn’t thick. They were in the 21st century, no more, no less.

“What. How?”

He hadn’t seen a calamity of this scale in any of the years he lived, and he’d visited every one of them in this millennium. This _did not happen_.

He pulled himself out of the water onto a grimy surface, mind numb, refusing to see it.

“Focus!” Archaeon croaked; sharp pain radiated from where she bit his ear. There were no answering bird cries. There was nothing at all.

The current suddenly changed – not the water, or the air either. It felt deeper than that. He wasn’t sure how he knew and for that he’d call it instinct or experience, but something in the channel of time was being _undone_.

It was brief, a small change, and the world started unravelling before his eyes.

But change was an illusion: that was how the universe worked! It only ran from order to chaos, endlessly on towards higher entropy. Events were set in stone: what would be would be because it already was.

He’d cracked. Lost his mind, clearly.

Another tug, and he couldn’t get away from there fast enough.

The next place certainly wasn’t a planet: he landed on a chunk of rock in a belt of similar bits of rock and ice, and he knew he was in space because, despite the inexplicably breathable atmosphere, there was a huge gas giant quite like Saturn hanging right over his shoulder, way too close for comfort. But Harry really had other things to concern himself with.

A prisoner, beaten to a bloody pulp, tried to kneel proudly beneath a floating throne. They were surrounded by a small army of cyborgs, armed with spears and blasters that struck at any bit of skin they could find.

Harry tensed, Archaeon froze and hunkered closer to his neck. Harry didn’t doubt for a second that he could be next. If they attacked, he would have to take his chances in a fight – he was already cornered, where could he run? Off the side of the rock? Apparate? Oh please, he’d misplaced his _planet;_ there was no way he would reach it under his own power.

He braced himself for another long moment. But they hadn’t even noticed him. He’d not been summoned. (Weird. Hadn’t that happened before? He had a funny feeling.) Regardless, he did not want that to change. Cloak. Right. He covered himself in slow, careful movements.

He’d like to skip any second now, please and thank you.

Oh, _dear Merlin_ how had he not noticed the giant purplish alien on the throne. Harry could feel the menace radiating off it, his mind frankly rebelled at the idea of stepping closer. Yet the prisoner met the being’s eyes with daring and hate. Harry felt a great swell of admiration, and more than that, pity. They were both helpless – to stop this, to escape.

“Silvertongue. Liesmith.” A decorated minion mocked the prisoner, its voice strange and deep in the echoless space. “Your pride betrays your dreams, little Prince. You value your knowledge and power, meagre as they are. You crave more, you fear loss. _He_ will grant that to you, and _laugh_ as it tears the mind you so value apart.”

But no, Harry’s helplessness was a choice. He would not sit by. If he was captured he’d fucking deal with it; they could not keep him here forever, not while time still moved. He snuck closer, ducked around the jeering aliens and towards the prisoner. Maybe he could grab him, maybe he could… what? _Then_ what? He had no clue, and he could feel Archaeon’s glared burning into the side of his head as she tried to silently remind him of this fact.

“You are weak, frost giant. _He_ will break your precious mind.” After receiving a gesture, the servant stepped forward with a box, and before Harry could consider acting, it’d forced the prisoner’s hand in.

All his limbs – and they were longer than the bony pile led Harry to believe – were suddenly straight and rigid. A horrible low groan was wretched from his throat. Thin fingers clenched until white around a glowing blue crystal.

The minion rolled the prisoner over with a sharp kick, grabbed his pointy chin and dragged his face up to the alien’s level. The hand released suddenly, and the man fell like a ragdoll.

“His mind is mostly intact,” the minion announced. “He will survive it long enough.” Harry wasn’t an expert on alien body language, but some things were universal, and that alien was pleased, but it was sort of an angry satisfaction offset by the disappointment that the crystal hadn’t reduced the prisoner to a drooling vegetable.

Harry suspected he had too much experience dealing with psychopaths.

“Good,” the purple monster rumbled. Harry just about shat himself. He couldn’t force himself to move, either to run or to fight. “Finally, a useful being in this forsaken system.”

The prisoner growled at the description, suddenly all bluster, a totally shift from the stoicism of before. “I am a king!” Harry could see that: he still did not bow, but that was being stripped from him, somehow, the dignity was falling apart. They had beaten him.

The servant moved to strike him, but aborted the gesture when the monster just chuckled, like the prisoner was an animal performing a neat trick, as ordered. “Do you have an army, puny king?”

The prisoner shook his head. It looked more like he was trying to shake off a headache than answer.

“I do. I will lend it to you, in exchange for the Tesseract.” The monster bared its teeth in amusement, and slouched on its throne, and Harry understood; this creature _owned_ pain, it was power personified; unstoppable, undeniable. Harry took another step forward.

The prisoner appeared to struggled with his tongue. “The Tesseract was lost to Asgard centuries past.”

“Do not try to mislead me. I know it has been found. You know where it is, and you _will_ bring it to me.”

The monster’s eyes narrowed and Harry, by now close behind the prisoner, caught the full force of the concentrated glare. Archaeon shook.

Because Harry’s shoulders were trembling.

Worse, it got so much worse. The monster’s nostrils flared and it sucked in a deep breath, tasting the foreign power in the air. There was recognition in its blue eyes when they snapped open. More terrifying than any of the menace this creature exuded, was the reverence and affection it turned on the exact spot Harry stood.

“Omen. You bring word from your master?”

He might have done it, maybe if things had been different Harry might have talked his way out of it, but the tug kicked in.

Harry desperately wished he could reach out and take the prisoner with him. Instead, he jumped, again and again. A few minutes at a time, he patched together a picture of a world very different to the one he’d lived through. The technology didn’t make sense, the human biology alone violated more physical laws than he could count on his fingers – he saw a regular muggle turn into an animated ice statue – he didn’t know where to _begin_ with his objections.

He saw more alien worlds than he cared to remember, but he never forgot about the first – the similarities alone assured that. It was the glowing weaponry – there were gleaming guns and swords and blasters, and then there was _weaponry_. A red mist, a yellow stone, the blue cube in lab after lab, but purple was by far the most popular colour.

Billions of aliens fell to purple light; some of the victims the very people that had attempted to wield it, the same ball changing hands over millions of years.

Not long after he came to that conclusion, and discovered a new aversion to all shades of violet, it all became a bit of a blur. There wasn’t time to breathe between one scene and the next.

The jumps were speeding up, until he seemed to linger more in the instant between time zones than at his destinations.

For an indeterminable span of time, he was unconscious. But somehow, he adapted: he became aware of Archaeon’s claws in his skin, her weight on his shoulder, he wasn’t breathing because he wasn’t alive and somehow that was alright. Existing felt completely different – not wrong or uncomfortable compared to how it had always been… but certainly different.

And then he truly opened his eyes to the world for the first time, and it was _breathtaking_.

As he flickered in and out of the normal world, the place in-between changed like a flipbook. Those flashes of the real world shortened all the time, until it he was there and gone so fast he simply couldn’t see it; he might as well be living in the place between. He wasn’t sure how long he endured it. His sense of time was strangely distorted, but it must have been significant; his hair greyed and grew past his waist, his skin seemed to age before his eyes.

He became aware of a noise, only that was too crude a description – it was the phoenix song. The fire flickered, always just out of the corner of his eye.

The phoenix was just one bright light among many flares. Harry recognised Death by his grin more than anything. But there were six other things that stood out: they were fainter, like echoes, they were not quite there. Purple, red, blue, orange, green, yellow, spread across the galaxies.

The green one felt personal.

An hourglass came to mind, a twisted loop made of clear crystal with no end or beginning, set within spinning silver rings. He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination or if it was actually there, or if such a distinction even mattered here. It looked like a time turner, it felt like more. Glowing green sand flowed endlessly from one side to the other.

He felt drawn to touch it and it was there, solid beneath his fingertips. The moment he made contact, the sand froze in the glass before it moved, piling over itself in mesmerising patterns and back up through the tubes, against gravity or whatever compelled it, following his finger.

All of a sudden, it was like his mind was emptied and the universe was shoved in. He felt really, _really_ tall; the multiverse was laid out bellow him and he could see the farthest reaches, every second that had passed and would ever be.

Galaxies hundreds of lightyears across, nebulae and dust clouds beyond the scope of reason on one side of the scale, and then he turned to see stars and planets and asteroid belts. There was darkness moving off like a shadow that Harry suspected was actually another dimension beside space and time.

But the miniscule details were still there; he could feel it, just like he could feel every proton, every quark, every secret, and the strings that tied them all together.

More and more information made itself known, headless of what his mind could take. Harry thought it broke him, just a bit.

It wasn’t a lot of time to digest the information, really. An entire universe from beginning to end. It lasted for a moment that felt like eternity.

His mind shut down.

He thought it’d done admirably up to that point.

…

It was the worst hangover of his entire life – no doubt about it. Harry had lost all sensation on the left side of his body. He was deaf in one ear. He might’ve been missing his toes, who could say, it wouldn’t have surprised him.

Oh and he was probably dead again. Whatever he’d done, it must’ve been impressive.

“What have you forgotten?”

Harry groaned. “Don’t ask mean questions, Death. How the fuck should I know?”

He remembered skipping, faster and faster until he blacked out. Ah, about that. “What’s going on?”

He was asking that question a lot lately. He’d start cursing things if he didn’t get answers.

Death smiled. “Take a seat. We have time. You are in a deep coma. You fried your brain in an empty corner of the universe.”

He’d calmed since their last meeting, now acting much more like his old abstract self, though still unsettlingly cheerful. Harry was no less wary.

“Do you remember what I told you of the Living Tribunal? The other cosmic entities like myself?” Death brought up from out of the blue.

Harry nodded. “Vaguely.”

“Did you ever wonder _how_ we came to predate this universe? How a physical being like Galactus could possibly survive the end of the previous universe and into this one, even though it took 300 000 years of cooling after the big bang for atoms to be able to hold onto electrons?”

“Of course.” He’d just given up when he couldn’t make heads or tails of it and decided to call it philosophy.

“You are beginning to understand.” Death proclaimed. Harry disagreed. He didn’t expect Death to just give him the answers, but it was still infuriating. “Only Eternity remembers it all from the true beginning. There was nothing, and then there was everything. But that universe ended, and the second came to be – as did I, as did the first infinity stone.”

“Infinity stone?” He’d heard that a number of times, now. He gathered that it was important.

Death hummed. “Another time, perhaps.”

Harry contemplated the futility of vengeance, at length. 

Sensing homicide in the works, the strange being grinned. “The answers are out there, if you want them badly enough.”

Harry hadn’t been thinking about going back, but the idea repulsed him more than pleading did. “Let me stay, I need rest.”

“Your body can sustain you again, off you go.”

…

He’d come full circle (had he even left?). He blinked awake, once again (still?) in a body bag. All the pain in his body had migrated to his head (surely that level indicated there was a piece of rebar through it. Would explain the body bag).

A bird pecked at him through the rough mesh. He ignored her. The past however long experience felt like a hallucination. His scrambled memories weren’t clear. Well, that was not quite true; but they didn’t make sense. He remembered an impression, as if he’d witnessed something more amazing than anything else could even hope to be. At first, it seemed like any other time he’d been on the good drugs.  

But… something about it lingered with him. Just _thinking_ about it sent a surge of power through him, and there was an undercurrent to that, like he’d learnt something despite himself. Something in his mind had been opened; like all the necessary knowledge had just been pieced together, he suddenly realised he knew how to resist jumping through time. _Intuitively_. Just like that.

It was Archaean. He was connected to her and she was connected to death. He needed to be solid and magical and basically mortal to interact with the world to do his job. But physical things don’t belong in Death’s realm. Hadn’t he suspected that his companion was a lot more flexible, less rooted in reality, more like a solid ghost? Hadn’t Odin suggested she was intrinsically linked to Death? It seemed so clear, now.

“ _Fuuuck_ ,” he moaned inanely, his voice muffled through the bag and material caught on his lips when they moved but he couldn’t care less. “Archaeon, did you slip colourful mushrooms into my food again?”

“No.”

“Damn,” he slurred.

He dozed, exhausted, while the crow picked at the zip above him. A hole appeared right above his eyes and the light was distracting enough to irritate, which was probably the blasted creature’s intention. Harry shimmied an arm up and pulled the zip the rest of the way.

“Thanks,” he told Archaeon, and almost meant it. Magic was too complicated to be advisable post brain-reconstruction, but he _really_ didn’t want to deal with an interrogation once these people realised one of their cadavers had aged fifty years the minute they’d stepped out the room, and in addition was now up and walking. Metaphorically. Walking was a bit hyperbolic.

He apparated, and by the end of it he’d lost half his toenails and they were stinging something fierce. He didn’t know where or when he was, and couldn’t work up the energy to care.

He was going to sleep.


	4. Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guardians of the Galaxy hit me with some inspiration, and then Ragnarok gave me a kick in the motivation. There is now a plot. I wasn’t sure this day would ever come.   
> I went back and made some changes to make things consistent with the new MCU movies, because it has been an age since I last updated this.   
> As an apology, the next chapter is almost finished.

_Definition: Time_

_Error 404: Satisfactory definition not found._

…

Archaean paced a stern line across the path and right over Harry’s prone body despite his objections, claws kicking out in a no-nonsense manner. “Enacting Disaster Response Plan Version D, unexpected trip. Step 1: obtain pants,” she declared, looking down with disdain. “Step 2: address bodily demands, fix structural damage, and plug anything leaking red. Step 3 –”

Harry groaned, lips twitching, which was rather the point of the whole parade. “I haven’t forgotten. It hasn’t been _that_ long since we got ourselves in deep shit.”

“Step 3?” She challenged.

“Return to base.”

“Wrong. Return to evil lair is step 3 in the megalomania trial period, in disaster response it doesn’t not arise until step 17. From the top!”

So he needed answers. Definitely. Before Archaean took it personally. He needed to get off the floor, and get out from under this bridge, and narrow down his location by more useful criteria.

Right. Back to basics. Live in the moment, survive in the now.

He examined his body with a little trepidation, but there was nothing important missing, and nothing new and exciting had been picked up along the way. He felt exhausted but fine.

Well, his joints ached a bit, but that’s to be expected when you camp in the nude at the grand old age of sixty-something.

With that, he conjured an outfit around himself, pleasantly surprised when it worked as expected, and got moving.

In short order, he made several interesting and important discoveries.

First: he was in Mongolia. Not especially remarkable, but good for context.

Second: the date was 17th April 2012. He made a quick mental list of all the smart people that would be alive at this point, that could help him, because –

Third: Harry was adrift in a way he didn’t really understand. Somehow, he’d lost the foothold he had in the timeline. Every mark, every echo from his presence in the past had vanished, like he’d never existed until now. Harry found himself, inexplicably, starting from scratch. His vault, the same one that had been reliably maintained by the goblins since time immemorial wasn’t just empty – it had never been started. His money, his tools, the various forged papers he’d collected over the years to assimilate himself in various periods were gone. There weren’t even ruins where his warded safe houses should have stood.

He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d had to craft an identity. It hadn’t been necessary for centuries, he’d just been readopting existing aliases. And to add shit to the pile, he was in an era where governments kept electronic records and might notice.

Archaean was no help at all. The crow kept making useful suggestions and insightful comments, like “regroup in England” or “find your family” or “don’t steal food from there, there’s a camera on the ceiling, catch your own you lazy bastard”. He listened because he was wavering in a deep rut of confusion and uncertainty, and _any_ three step plan felt like progress. Besides, it was nice to have someone else to blame when things went wrong.

There was one constant he could cling to, a pattern he adhered to every single lifetime. The routine was automatic at this point. He borrowed a quill, begged some paper, and hired the sturdiest owl he could afford with some dubiously acquired money.

Meticulously, he wrote out the message. He wrote and vanished several drafts, even though he’d written this same letter a thousand times over his life, it was never quite perfect.

He sat completely still, until the owl disappeared in the direction of Andromeda Tonks. He did nothing useful all day. There were innumerable things that had to be done, none of them as pointless as that warning, but he was just tired. That happened when his body aged. It made him slow, but it made him patient. There was no rush. Today he would think and plan and rest, tomorrow he would act.

Harry ran through the motions; he ended up fashioning a park bench into a comfortable rest spot by muscle memory, and lay down to eat the food he didn’t remember procuring.

But without anything to occupy him, he couldn’t ignore a low itch, radiating from the crow and focusing not far enough in the back of his mind that he could ignore it. Someone was summoning Death, and the time stream had decided he should answer. It was still new and familiar, and despite being damn irritating, it felt glorious that he could tell it to get stuffed.

…

There was a heavy weight on his shoulder, a beak in his hair. Harry shrugged, moodily, but its balance was unfortunately adept. 

“Get off.”

The bird hissed in his ear, deep and unfamiliar. 

“What the –” he rolled instantly, eyes searching for the unknown menace, off his side and onto his back and further than the surface allowed. Only a desperate grab at the back of the bench saved him from a short drop.

The owl dealt with his tossing with regal disdain; wings spread, talons digging in, fluffed up and annoyed.

Archaean chortled. Tilting his head back, Harry glared and the crow perched on the backrest, but the owl was an impatient beast; it flexed its talons, adding another set of punctures to the stinging line from his shoulder to chest.

He would deal with her later.

“What do you want?” he demanded of the owl.

Perhaps disliking his tone, it brandished its sharp weaponry in his face, threatening blindness or disembowelment or – wait a minute. Oh, he just had mail.

Squinting in the morning light, battling the wax seal with one hand, Harry made a note to get set up on the internet as soon as possible; the notifications were much less imposing.

It was the usual reply: they have no idea what he’d talking about, there’s no Teds or Teddys or Lupins in this family with any kind of terminal heart condition.

He frowned. Odd – it sounded even more bewildered than usual. It raised his interest, and despite himself, he read it again. Abnormalities stacked up – Andromeda didn’t even acknowledge Harry. It sounded more like she was talking about her husband Ted, that Teddy must have been a mistake or nickname, like her grandson didn’t even exist.

He had very bad feeling. “Do you remember that terrible future with the robots, the feeling that someone was changing time.” What if they could?

Archaean nodded, unable to hide how unsettle she was. “Something is wrong,”

“And all those things Death said. Being frozen for decades broke something.”

“We need answers. Right now.”

The wizard sighed into his hands, gripped his hair until it hurt. “I know.”

“Start from the beginning. News. History. We can’t take anything for granted.”

“I _know_.”

“I’ll hit the newspapers, you get in a library.”

“All right, I’m going!” Once the words were out there, he realised he’d taken a misstep right into her plans. His eyes narrowed. “Don’t be so smug, it makes you look fat.”

Instantly, she puffed up twice her size, the picture of a creature of mortally offended. She attempted to supress that reaction with little success.

“Hah!” Harry shouted gleefully, and apparated to ensure he got the last word.

…

This was not Harry’s timeline, it couldn’t be. For centuries, nothing had changed. He knew it backwards and forwards. Now, Harry was hard pressed to find events that had stayed the same. The big general details, sure; the world wars had happened, England still had a queen.

But Grindlewald was an internationally recognised hero. After Dumbledore had died fighting a HYDRA incursion in WW2, he’d done a one-eighty overnight and sought revenge instead of power.

Genetic mutation had decided to break all biological rules and common sense. Instead of getting all sorts of nasty cancers, mutations spontaneously formed incredibly complex and useful things, like wings or telepathy or inexplicable shape shifting.

These mutants were showing up everywhere they didn’t belong, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, or at a President’s assassination, or a battleground fighting an Egyptan mutant god. Even if he put aside physics, it couldn’t have happened. Harry had seen the pyramids getting built; if that Apocalypse bloke had been around he’d like to think he would’ve noticed.

This Tony Stark guy was the biggest name around, an ex-weapons designer and modern superhero who flew around in a work of engineering genius that frankly made no sense to Harry at all.

Superheros and supervillains were so popular they were almost mundane. Civil repair bills were through the roof.

Archaean returned with terrible news. “Peter Quill is not currently rising to musical fame. There has been no mention of him at all.” She was heartbroken. Harry stroked her feathers consolingly.

Everything was more extreme. Tenser. Worse.

Several hours in the library were not enough. He spent days there, getting his head around muggle matters, before he could psych himself up enough to get back to the wizarding world.

…

Sirius had knocked down Grimmauld Place the moment his mother died, and turned it into a nightclub. Decades of protection and work, gone in a fit of spite. This, Harry discovered abruptly when he got sick of sleeping under the stars. Metaphorically. In Scotland, the stars were rarely seen.

Ron was working with his father, he’d recently married a girl Harry had never met. Hermione was mildly famous, having become a Triwizard Champion on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tournament being reinstated. They were both 32. Harry Potter was not. There hadn’t been a little boy living under some stairs at the Dursley household; there hadn’t been a Boy-Who-Lived at all.

Lily and James haven’t died. They had a girl, born two years later than Harry had been, without the war and without the urgency to rush straight out of school. There’d been nothing to test Pettigrew’s loyalty; he was a beloved uncle.

Sirius was enjoying life as a mechanic. He and Remus had a deeper friendship than any Harry had ever seen – without a war to cast suspicions, it developed fully and casually. Harry wasn’t sure whether it was romantic, but neither of them were looking for anyone else, either. He’s not sure if Remus and Tonks ever met, Teddy certainly didn’t exist.

Frank Longbottom was the head of the DMLE. Luna was discovering creatures at an impressive pace. Cedric Diggory was running for Minister in the next term.

They weren’t the people he knew, and he was not a person they’d ever met.

Wizarding Britain hadn’t seen war since the 40s. It left the world feeling so much _bigger_ ; the Hogwarts cohort was twice the size, every day in Diagon Alley looked like the week before September 1st, there were families there that he only recognised from laments on remembrance days of Voldemort’s first reign of terror.  

This should feel like a success. It was peaceful, they were happy. And if it was because Harry had gotten frozen it ice, it was objectively the best thing he had ever done.

He felt numb. 

It was a nightmare, a glimpse at a different possibility – and something dark in his heart whispered _is this what the world would look like, if you didn’t exist?_

The weight of every difference between this timeline and the last was heavy on his shoulders. After centuries of believing he had no culpability or free will in any way that mattered, that was almost more than he could bear. 

He loved these people. He needed them in his life, but could he even touch it, without leaving ruins in his wake?

He wanted to try. It was terrifying, but he was used to that.

…

The multiverse theory had been disproven in the 23rd century with the Einstein-Holten formula.

There were many dimensions – like wizard pocket space, or Death’s realm – but all of them were constrained by the same laws of physics, so you couldn’t use them to take a gander onto an alternate future.

But that was back in a world where natural laws made sense. Despite what Harry’s head was telling him was impossible, this looked like an alternate universe. He couldn’t discount the possibility that the nonsense physics on this side of the hypothetical multiverse could be the culprit.

Maybe during his crazy time skipping some wires got crossed, he didn’t know.

It was one of the only ideas that made sense – it would explain the different laws of physics, the different events. He was hoping, anyway, because at least if it’s a parallel universe there’s a chance of travelling _back_.

Because on the other side of the optimism spectrum, hesitant evidence was stacking up for another idea. Because if the multiverse existed, then there was the as-yet unconfirmed possibility that time travel may be able to change events without incurring a paradox. Which meant, this could very well be _his_ universe; broken, changed, and the new normal.

He paced to the wall, turned, three four five, turned. He didn’t have to think about it, didn’t even have to look where he was going by now.

“Why did Death bring up the Tribunal anyway? Previous universes, Infinity Stones, that came out of nowhere. Why those things, why _now_?”

The crow shrugged. “It’s a place to start.”

“I have a better idea. Let’s see if we can’t just scramble things in reverse.” He closed his eyes and handed himself over to the incessant tugging feeling.

…

It didn’t work the first time, nor the next twenty. None of his old friends remembered him, not even Leonardo. Harry had the privilege of running from that Apocalypse nutter in person, which was… novel. But there’s nothing like having history throw a house at you to make it sink in.

He sat down for a moment in the 17th century and realised he was stuck there, in a world that was both brighter and darker; full more desperate and irrational muggles on one side of the and happier, complacent wizards. No one was like him. He was an alien, utterly alone, but for a bird.

By unspoken agreement, they kept jumping until they were dumped in a time full of familiar faces. It hurt, of course it did, seeing those faces pass over him without interest, but he owed it to them to try not to shut them out.

…

Harry liked the 2000’s, you didn’t run into as much hatred and prejudice as earlier centuries. The internet was accessible. He hadn’t seen it all a hundred times, so 2005 was decent enough. Pop music was rising to fame, but no decade was perfect.

And that was not a prognosis he was expecting to make when his day started with a heart attack in the middle of Diagon Alley.

“Tom Riddle?!” Harry choked.

The man – and he was very noticeably not a monster, with greying hair and a nose in their expected places – was aging elegantly. He looked no older than Harry, and he had to be pushing eighty. There wasn’t even a mole out of place, that bastard.

“Good afternoon,” Riddle greeted curiously, in a somewhat brusque manner. The lack of cursing was promising but deeply unsettling. “Did I surprise you?”

Shit, now what. Harry couldn’t bluff his way out of this quickly; this man was all but a stranger. By his manner of dress, a-la-Lucius, Harry would guess he was a politician, but something didn’t sit quite right.

“Harry Potter, nice to meet you.” He said, stalling. Oh dear Merlin he sounded like a fan.

Riddle offered his hand, and there it was – a mark. An invisible signature, between the forefinger and thumb, only given to those that are sworn into the Department of Mysteries.

A random citizen wouldn’t notice it, and even if they did, it wasn’t outwardly interesting enough to catch their attention. Harry glanced up smoothly, but he’d been staring for a second too long.

Tom displayed an expression that was very, very interested.

For fucks _sake_.

In hindsight, he can deal with muggles firing lasers out of their arses, that’s not too surreal. Tea with Voldemort was where he drew the line.

…

Archaean landed by his head. “You need sleep. Do you want to fix this mess? Because all you’re fit for in this state is counting carrion.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” Harry stared at the ceiling, blinding sluggishly. Melodramatic? Perhaps not.

The crow fluffed up angrily, and dropped heavily onto his stomach. She took great care to stomp on all the painful organs. Which was a little unfair, considering his agony stemmed from resisting her influence in the first place.

Harry barely noticed above the ache in his head. “It’s getting worse,” he noted ominously.

“And going on 38 hours without rest couldn’t _possibly_ be a contributing factor,” she muttered sarcastically, dropping a flask of Headache Cure in reach. At least, Harry thought it was a pain relief potion. It had a Dreamless-Sleep kind of sheen to it. He squinted at her suspiciously.  

In any case. “Which business are we going to have to avoid from now on?”

“Relax, I didn’t steal from an Apothecary,” Achaean scoffed.

“Really?” Harry smiled.

“I took it from a fat child.”

“Oh for –”

She sniffed aloofly. “Hopefully the absence of a cure to his every need will build some of the character the slob was clearly lacking.”

Harry had given up on that argument centuries ago, he wasn’t in the mood to rehash it now. He chugged the foul concoction, and felt some pressure release. “I can still feel the pull. It’s no stronger, but what if I can’t resist it while I’m out?”

“Stop inventing problems, we have enough already.”

“Right. Right, it’ll happen if it happens. Sure.” He was out like a light. He dreamed of summoning circles and desperate prayers. He’d been through so many, he couldn’t tell if this vision was remembered or imagined.

He woke up a day after closing his eyes, and sighed in relief.

…

Harry’s business was slow to get off the ground. Diagon believed itself above shady trinkets, and Knocturn already had a surplus of people hawking enchanted items, most of them complete rubbish, which gave the occasional desperate entrepreneur a substantial hurdle to overcome.

Small protective amulets, talismans, activated runes. Harry didn’t promise luck or love or what-have-you. Which isn’t to say that he _couldn’t_. His enchantments worked, but to get sales, they had to produce results that people could see. He made novelty items, really; hair changing charms, fairy summons, constant cleaning charms. The disguise line was suspiciously lucrative; most of his business, in fact, came from a few regulars. Harry practiced turning the ol’ blind eye.  

It wasn’t particularly difficult magic, but it was finicky. It had faded into obscurity before wizards began public schooling. Like so many arts, the secrets died with masters that didn’t train apprentices. While some secrets had been recovered or reinvented, modern enchantments weren’t quite right.

Harry’s animated toys didn’t have to be activated by a spell, they didn’t follow patterns as if they were machines. His shield amulets didn’t get bored and switch themselves off. The lightning-in-a-bottle, technically an ancient battery, did very well in this century as a pretty lamp and didn’t explode when it encountered certain harmonic frequencies.

With everything he’d learnt in the past, and the future, and centuries of practice, the quality of his work was unmatched, except by goblins.

None of it was flying off the shelf. Or the bag, rather – he had yet to upgrade to a shelf.

The handful of galleons he made in the first week was a pittance, his mentor Ahmose would have thrown him in Nile for such disregard for his craft. But they covered the cost of the headache potions. He didn’t need anything else too desperately. He was living off fish, berries and the occasional suspect mushroom; sleeping in a transfigured tent; dressing in transfigured clothes. Luckily, he’d become a master as messing up the transformation just enough to get things permanently stuck.

Patience. Word would spread. What was a few months, in the scope of things?

…

Archaean landed on the table, demanding attention. “Erik Selvig, astrophysicist, specialises in thermodynamics and travel. Works with Jane Foster, another astrophysicist, pioneer in wormholes.”

Harry hummed. “Promising.”

“Reed Richards, started out in interstellar travel, sticks his nose in multiverse theory in his spare time.”

“He published anything useful?”

“He’s hardly published at all. For all his reported genius, he seems to prefer playing with spaceships than doing a job.”

“We’ll fight that battle if we have to. Anyone else?”

“Henry Pym, major breakthroughs with quantum and atomic physics in your area, but mainly studies insects.”

“Excellent. What would it take to get a meeting?”

“A lucrative business partnership or a PhD and a nerdy conference.”

“Well, while we’re forging school records, we might as well break out the old bachelor degree. It’s not much, but it might open some doors. If we want honours or masters, we’ll probably have to do that again. I suspect it would be easier to write another thesis than to take credit for one that doesn’t exist in this timeline.”

“We need contacts,” Archaean agreed. “Start with the Unspeakables, they’ll take the longest to crack open.”

“We’re nobodies again. How on earth do you think I’m going to get a word in with them?”

“You already tripped over it – Tom Riddle.”

“What, no! We still don’t know if he’s running the ministry like a puppet show, with extra secret police on the side.”

“I’d be surprised if he wasn’t. But who else is there?”

“Ugh. The worst part is, you’re right.”

…

Harry could not believe he was doing this.

“I can’t _believe_ I’m doing this.”

“You’re just pouting because you enjoyed it last time,” the crow asserted shrewdly.

He couldn’t deny it. She’d know. “Why do I even talk to you?”

“Don’t worry,” she continued frankly, “If you find yourself appreciating his comments, it’s not because he’s seducing you to the dark side, it’s because he’s more charismatic and intelligent than you are.”

“Gee, thanks.”

It was too late anyway. Archaean had the invitation to tea in her claws, there was no force on Earth that would take it back.

…

Harry had time to kill before Archaean would force him to meet Riddle. He dropped by the apothecary. The young man at the counter frowned. “Same order?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“You aren’t taking all these potions yourself?”

“Do I look like came down in the last shower?” Harry grouched with his special old man scowl. “I’ve been taking potions since before your parents were sorted.”

The shop keeper didn’t buy it for a second. “And you’re aware that you can be arrested for reselling without a licence?”

Harry glared. “I’m just stocking up for a trip.”

The man raised an eyebrow. “Prolonged use may cause nerve damage, drowsiness, extreme cognitive impairment, temporary blindness, immunity to the potion due to tolerance. And if you increase the dose, coma or death.”

“I’m aware it’s not a long-term solution,” he muttered irritably, feeling the noose closing in around his neck.

Pain amulets had many of the same problems, and a few extra just for fun. Finding the right combination was proving difficult.

He was working on it.

…

“Mr Riddle,” Harry greeted, trying not to slink across to the café table.

“Mr Potter, what a pleasant surprise. I’d not expected to see you again so soon.” Riddle was interested already. Harry had been counting on it. The smooth running of this plan relied on Riddle’s willingness to invest time and effort. “How are you liking England. Have you settled in yet?”

“Feels like home already. New friends, new sights to see. Business is picking up,” he lied as best he could, too aware that he was trying to dupe the master.

“What do you do for a living? You so skilfully avoided it last time we spoke.” Not quite surreal, but certainly unnerving as hell.

“I enchant objects. I have a few products I make in bulk, but I intend to fill commissions once word gets around a bit more.”

“Do you have a speciality?”

“I’m more of a jack of all trades. If it can be enchanted, I can do it. Muggle items included. I’ve studied their technology extensively. I tend to have more success in that area than my competitors.”

“Fascinating. I once tried my hand at enchantments, many years ago. I confess I didn’t learn much. May I examine your work, do you have anything on you?”

As soon as the zip was open, a wooden bird took the chance to escape his bag. “No muggle things; haven’t got the permits yet,” he said distractedly, grabbing a few trinkets. The bird flew around his head, twittering madly, until Archaean hissed at it, and it darted up his sleeve.  

Riddle focused on an amulet. He would recognise the quality. He might even recognise some cultural quirks, from priceless antiques that had passed through Borgan and Burks, or on his international travels. If he’d even done either of those things.

Uncertainty was going to get old real fast.

In the absence of all else, he was still an Unspeakable, he’d know _something_ about obscure magic.

“Where did you learn this?” There was a promising intensity to his voice.

“Egypt. Uganda. South Africa. Guam. Malta. Couple other places. I spent my youth travelling.”

“This is impressive work,” Riddle said, which is Slytherin for ‘This could be profitable for me, let’s negotiate.’

Harry sat forward, linked his fingers. “I’m beginning a new project.”

Harry knew exactly how to pitch it. Considering this talented and astute man would’ve been Voldemort, if he’d just chosen to do some terrible things, Harry would be willing to bet that he was not a very charitable person. Riddle wasn’t going to give Harry anything for free, which put them at a bit of an impasse, because Harry had nothing both harmless and valuable to offer. He had to get Riddle to _want_ to help, and that meant he had to be curious.

Harry was so close, he could see the desire behind the caution. He’d come this far. He took a breath. “I need to talk to someone who knows about time.” That revealed a little more than he’d intended for this stage. Harry suspected it hadn’t been entirely his idea.

But Riddle’s offer would reveal if this was going to be a beneficial partnership or if Harry was going to have to fight him for as long as he was useful and drop him at the first opportunity. Riddle would want something in return. Harry was relatively confident it wouldn’t be too evil, but couldn’t help but worry because fine print and things worse than death and yeah. _Voldemort_.

“I believe I can help you, there.” Harry was certain of that, but a little surprised that Riddle had offered something so valuable straight away. The cost was sure to be phenomenal. “You show such promise, I would be very interested in overseeing your research.”

Well, that was worse than he’d imagined. He should’ve known the scary smart side of Riddle’s personality would rear its ugly head.

There was a glint in his eye, there would be no budging on this.

“I’d be delighted to keep you updated,” he grit his teeth. “It’s not often individuals such as yourself take interest.”

Riddle ignored that probe.

“The Ancient One – she wasn’t born with magic, but she discovered how to manipulate the world through old Celtic traditions. Such magic is rather limited in scope, but powerful nonetheless. She has a very interesting relationship with time. She’s as old as the Flamels. If you discover how she has managed that, I would be very curious to hear it.”

Ah, the pursuit of immortality. It was disturbing and yet refreshingly familiar.

“And she knows about time,” Harry checked. He wouldn’t put it past Riddle to send him on a wild goose chase, in the hope that he’d learn something that Riddle wanted to know. Unfortunately for him, over the years Harry had a developed a short list of people who must be kept away from the eternal grind at all costs, and none had topped Voldemort yet.

“She knows more about time than any individual I’ve encountered. She can also grant you access to a library of knowledge, completely separate to our own. You may have luck there. I, of course, can make enquires with my contacts at work.”

Maybe Riddle was a little _too_ interested. “Thank you, Mr Riddle.”

“Please, call me Tom.”

Harry died a little inside.

“Here,” Harry flinched, for a second, when Riddle drew his wand, but the man just cast a portkey charm on his napkin. “It will take you to Kamar-Taj, Nepal, and back once.”

Harry accepted the cloth warily.

“I look forward to our next meeting. Your work is of a standard I have not seen in many years.”

“Would you like one? On the house.” Show your friends. Please. Your very rich friends.

“Do you have any snakes?”

Harry remembered, a few seconds too late to deflect to a safer animal, that Riddle was a parselmouth. The horses whinny, the songbirds are full of snark, but Harry understood snakes, they could string together a few too many coherent words.

_“Mouse? Big mouse. Splinters, scales, find mouse.”_

Riddle blinked, and on second thought, this was the best thing Harry had done all day. He could see the cogs were oscillating between ‘coincidence’ and ‘fucking what.’ Harry looked on with all the innocence he could muster, to disguise how he hoped the mystery would irritate him to no end.

…

Harry had to admit, the bastard could make a good portkey. It didn’t drop him straight on his head or his arse. That he ended up in such a state anyway, only confirmed that there was still an element of user error that couldn’t be accounted for.

Archaean took off immediately, landing in the rafters of the Asian-style building to laugh at him.

“I’ll squish you, one of these days,” he muttered with an ominous ring of truth. “You won’t find it so amusing then.”

Harry stood slowly with a low groan, barely paying attention to dusting himself off as he took in the view. He appeared to be in a foyer of sorts. Gateways displaying other locations were open behind him. A frazzled man in red robes, nearly bald and carting a book under one arm, hurried in.

The man took in Harry’s clothes, his wand, and the greeting died on his lips, replaced by an exasperated groan.

“Wizard?”

“Harry Potter,” he offered a hand.

“Wong,” he ignored the hand and stomped back the way he’d come. He didn’t bother to keep his muttering to himself. “British, too. Fantastic. I suppose you want to speak to the Ancient One? This way.”

“Prompt.” He held an arm out on reflex at the sound of fluttering feathers, and Archaean landed softly. She had him well trained.

“We’ve found that it’s more efficient if we send you straight back to Riddle with a firm ‘no’ in writing.”

Harry blinked. “Oh, this happens often then?”

“Halt,” called a new voice. A woman had managed to shroud herself in the shadows of a side corridor, despite being dressed in bright yellow. “Why are you here?”

Wong bowed. “He’s one of Riddles –”

“He’s not just a wizard.” Her eyes bore into him.

Excellent, she was well informed. Harry smiled. “The Ancient One, I presume?”

A curt nod.

“I’ve found myself a little puzzle regarding time, and I do not understand enough to solve it.”

She considered him carefully.

“Join me for lunch.”

…

“Lock down The Eye of Agamotto. Put it in the deepest vaults, enable all protections.”

“The Eye? Is Potter a threat?”

“He could be.”


	5. Manipulate

_Definition: Manipulate (verb)_

  1. _To handle or control in a skilful manner_
  2. _To control or influence a person or situation cleverly or unscrupulously_



…

“You are masking great pain. It is not wise to ignore such signals.” The Ancient One ladled more soup into her bowl.

“It’s incapacitating,” he pointed out.

“Pain serves to warn us of the inadvisability of our current course.”

“I’m only off the rails because the last track was also debilitating. This is actually a step down on the agony spectrum. So, by your logic that’s a step in the right direction.”

“A step more sideways than forwards, perhaps. Potions will not solve your problem, merely replace it.”

Right, he was getting a little sick of this line of reasoning. “Yeah, that’s the goal: find a set of side effects I can live with.”

“And how is progress on that front?”

The last set of amulets and covered his head in scales which made all his hair fall out and he still wasn’t sure why. Whatever. He’d avoided wiping his memories, making himself oblivious to all sensation, or turning himself into a drooling lunatic, all of which would be far easier to accidentally accomplish.

“Progress is being made,” he insisted.

She raised a stern eyebrow; a tell-tale indicator that an excessive amount of seriousness had accumulated in one person. It didn’t seem to be correlated to age, because he wasn’t nearly as uptight and he was far older, both in body and mind.

A personality flaw, then.

“You should remain here for a while. It is a good place for healing.”

“Will you answer my questions then?”

“Eventually. There will be a lot to take in. Time is a complicated matter.”

…

The answers didn’t come pouring in. He didn’t even see her again for the first fortnight. Harry tackled the library instead, which held the occasional gem but would take years to go through entirely. Maybe longer, since half of it was in Sanskrit. Not his forte.

The most useful thing he learned, was actually thrown out in casual conversation.

“What’s this place for?” Harry had asked Wong, prompting an irritated sigh.

“We protect Earth from mystic threats in the multiverse.”

“Multiverse, you say?” Harry straightened, heart racing. “That’s been proven?”

Wong shot him a considering look and a smile that Harry didn’t trust. “I can show you.”

It was worse than portkeys. Oh, so much worse. Portkeys were at least _describably_ unpleasant; this magic surpassed even that boundary.

Harry granted that a soft yes on multiverse theory. He wasn’t convinced; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, because seeing is not believing, especially when it so closely resembles a bad acid trip.

But for the moment, time travel wasn’t his top priority. Harry needed to get off headache potions before he developed too much tolerance to them. He had reached a point where the amulets could supplement some of his medication, which was great because the effects of each dose was wearing off sooner. He didn’t know how long he had until they stop working entirely, but his toes had started to tingle and that was not a good sign.

He couldn’t tweak the configuration to optimise it further, he suspected he’d exhausted the potential of that particular idea. The amulets just weren’t as effective as he needed them to be. The hub was still out of alignment with the satellite pentagrams. He was beginning to think that series would never work. A dead end. He couldn’t afford many more of those. He had a few weeks at most.

Then, perhaps he should stop trying to force it? The hub was one of the first pieces, so pivotal that he hadn’t seriously considered substituting something in its place, instead trying to fit the puzzle around it. It was a regeneration and healing runic series – it made sense, for his purpose. But what if he used an energising series instead; it would be less polarised, more flexible to extensions… maybe.

The answer was close, he’d done the hard yards, but there was still something just out of sight.

At least he had plenty of spares to pawn off. He could now cure baldness, irritation, inflammation and gout. Perhaps someone would buy them. Provided Riddle would vouch for their authenticity to the niche market of people that hated potions for their taste and faster results.

Yeah, not likely.

…

He didn’t believe it.

Archaean sounded as stunned as he felt. “I think we’ve got it.”

It was coarse and bulky. The bone carvings needed to be set properly in their fittings. The axis was a bit lopsided… which could make the whole thing explode if jolted, best to fix that now.

A copper Celtic knot tied it all together, extra thick to increase the surface area; every inch of it was engraved with runes. It started narrow on top, broadened in the middle, before separating into twisted branches around a central hexagon, like a weird insect.

Perhaps not a work of art. Actually, it was rather hideous by any standard except the skill that had gone into it. By that measure, it was a masterpiece.

Now he just had to figure out what to do with it. He charmed it unremovable and unbreakable, and wished he could charm it smaller without turning it into sizzling goo – it was the size of a plate. If only he could put it in an undetectably extended pocket, but it needed to stay on him, which unfortunately limited it to the first three dimensions. He couldn’t even wear it as a belt or he would skewer himself when he bent over.

This thing really was no end of trouble. For the time being, he stuck it to his chest with a charm. He had done enough problem solving for the day.

He had just invented hangover immunity, and while a part of him was interested in celebrating and trying out that side effect, he mostly just wanted to enjoy the sunshine for a bit.

Good Merlin, he really was turning into an old man.

…

“One of Tom’s associates wants to know if you can whip up something that will keep the sparrows out of his attic without chasing off his owls,” Archaean announced.

“Reading my mail? Do you have any decency?” Harry muttered absently, mind already working in different directions. He froze somewhere in between chili and water guns, appalled. “Wait, since when is he _Tom_?”

“He has done our business a rather large service.” She bobbed her head in an ungainly shrug. “And as far as I know, he hasn’t murdered a flock of people. Anything less, and isn’t he’s just as bad as any other CEO?”

“Exactly. The cynicism is justified.”

“His needs likely align with ours,” the crow countered.

Harry took interest. “How do you figure?”

“Well that’s obvious. He wants to learn something from this place, something the Ancient One doesn’t want him to discover. He doesn’t want any distractions dragging us away for too long.”

“So, you think he’ll take care of all our worries,” Harry mused, entertained by the thought of Riddle as scarily competent secretary. “He’s going to want meetings, isn’t he.”      

“I’ve been expecting marching orders for days. Catch up, Potter.”

…

Meeting with Riddle was never boring. It was stressful, as only regular eye contact with a world-renown Legilimens could be, but that wasn’t the only reason.

Riddle was argumentative, to say the least. Harry suspected there wasn’t a subject that they couldn’t find a reason to disagree on. He took sick pleasure in punching logic shaped holes in all of Harry’s favourite opinions, and Harry couldn’t backdown from that kind of challenge. He often kept Harry overtime, even on weekends. The man needed a hobby. 

To make matters worse, if – _if,_ thank you very much– he managed to slaughter Harry in the topic of the day, he would debate Archaean instead, and each victory just made her more unbearably cocky.

And that was another thing! He was far too smart for his own good. Not only that, he backed it up with endless research and a perfect memory. He was curious to the point of being a pain in the arse, and he loved magic so deeply it made Harry kind of uncomfortable.

He would be the perfect person to run ideas past, if Harry wasn’t constant doubting is motives.

It wasn’t that Harry looked forward to their meetings, exactly, it was just…  

“Is that another letter from Tom – oh look, now you’ve got me doing it.” Sometimes he forgot himself.

Archaean puffed up smugly. “You like him.”

Yes. That was the absolute _worst_ thing about the bastard.

…

“You haven’t told Tom Riddle how I extended my life,” the Ancient One said, which was an odd greeting for this day and age, in Harry’s opinion.

“I don’t know it,” he shrugged.

“You have suspicions.”

True. “You either made a deal with a celestial or you impressed Eternity.”

“He would reward you greatly for even that hint to immortality.”

He knew too well how far Riddle’s fear of death went. “Maybe I’m saving him the pain. Immortality isn’t worth it.”

“I believe the worth of a life is measured by how one spends it, and such a thing cannot be defined by how long or short the span.”

“I disagree. It’s better to have an ending. Some closure. In infinity, there’s always a task to do tomorrow, it just feels a lot more insignificant.”

“An interesting perspective, but that is not what I wished to discuss with you,” she gestured for him to walk with her, and they moved into the most private wing of the building. “Time, the infinity stones and the entities are all interconnected. Eternity, Death, Infinity, Oblivion, the Phoenix, Nemesis. Have you heard of them?”

“Barely, I only know what Death told me, which was probably more than I’ve been able to understand, and less than would be useful.”

“But you have encountered infinity stones, I wager.”

He had been called to the Tesseract twice now, when it got active. Instinct prevented him from mentioning those encounters. “Various important people keep dropping them in conversation, yes.”

“There are six, each with different properties. Power, space, soul, mind, reality, time. They bend classical physics. Magic is linked to the reality stone. Teleportation, the multiverse, and interdimensional travel like portkeys and apparition are linked to the space stone.”

“And time travel is possible because of the time stone?”

“Not in its strictest sense. One may travel forward in time by approaching a large mass or incredible speed, or loop backwards to repeat time with your time turners. We know this type of time travel is different, because it can be accomplished without invoking the stone. The manipulation of past events is a different matter.”

Harry’s heart stalled and rushed to catch up. “Has that happened before?”

“Perhaps. The original timeline would be overwritten. Only the person who experienced both timelines could confirm it,” she glanced at him. He had winced, but that was still a bit raw and new. “There is a group of people that were rumoured to have changed time, some of the X-men. Speak to Professor Charles Xavier.”

“Xavier. Got it.”

Her stare was a bit unnerving. “You have experienced time travel, have you not? How did you find it?”

“Predictable. I never changed events,” Harry would have felt more certain, but that frozen experience had thrown a wrench in his confidence.

“You must use the simple kind of time travel.”

Harry grunted noncommittally. He had been so sure that was the only type of time travel the universe permitted. He’d looked _everywhere_ for an example of manipulative travel. Nothing, until the world had gone mental – now he had several leads lined up and ready to go.

If the something was fundamentally different, Harry intended to find out. He had trawled through newspapers in his brief stint in 2012. He would try to change things in the next seven years. If he succeeded, that would settle it.

The Ancient One continued. “There should be a mechanism causing it, there may be a way to stop it.”

Unfortunately, Harry knew who was responsible for it, and he suspected he might be punching over his weight, trying to confront Death directly. He’d already tried every loophole Hermione could think of.

But there was something about the infinity stones that wasn’t adding up. Harry would know, he’d always had a good mind for mysteries. “Death said at the beginning there was only one stone.” Why did that feel important?

“They are thought to be singularities, they could easily have formed through the energy of the Big Bang.” And the subsequent Big Crunch collapse due to gravity would trigger a new expansion event, a new universe and a new infinity stone. That would be the simple explanation. It made sense, to a point. Didn’t explain how anything solid had survived the process, though.

“No, that’s not the same,” he muttered distractedly. “Death was very specific. He mentioned Eternity, and a true beginning. As if there wasn’t more than one.”

The Ancient One thought for a long moment, but she had nothing more to offer.

“I do not know how they work or where they came from. The most important thing about the infinity stones is that they are never united. Nemesis is said to manifest through their combined power. If this is an entity or a metaphor, it does not bode well for anyone.”

…

“Mister Potter, I presume?” Ollivander rattled from the back of the shop. “Your work has been the talk of the Alley. I would have thought your wand would be treating you well.”

“There was an accident overseas,” Harry lied, because purchasing a spare is the kind of thing associated with career criminals. “I’ve heard you’re the best in the business.”

“It’s always such a shame when people don’t take due care,” the old man levelled him with a very unimpressed look. “Your wand hand?”

The elder wand could sit at the bottom of his rucksack with the cloak and the ring. Hopefully it didn’t scare off every other wand in the shop. It tended to be a bit possessive. But he needed a backup, even if it was a bad fit. He’d almost pulled the elder wand out in from of Riddle yesterday.

That would’ve been exciting.

Harry counted himself lucky that Riddle didn’t dare talk about his department research into Death, or the lies would really start getting tangled. 

…

In some ways, Harry liked being an old man. The older he looked, the more shit he could get away with.

If he saw a ridiculous hat asking for someone to take the piss, he could mock and giggle to his heart’s content and society would let it slide. The next day, he could buy that same hat, beige crocs, and trousers that go up over his stomach and hunt for anyone wearing their jeans low enough for him to see their underwear and confront them on their fashion sense.

If he found himself talking to a dull person he could try to outdo them, see how long he could drag out a boring story and repel any efforts to change the subject. Sometimes he would let them think they’d succeeded before crushing them with the infamous, “and another thing”.

After he aged to the point that he could barely see through sagging wrinkles, he could get away with murder. How did he know? He had hit Abraxas Malfoy with a staff once. Dreadful man. He wasn’t a child – he’d just taken a senior post in the Ministry, he must have been at least thirty – but he was acting like one. Merlin, it was one of the most satisfying moments of Harry’s life. He still carried a walking stick in anticipation of another opportunity.

Even the side effects of aging weren’t so bad, with magic. He could handle most of them with his enchantments or potions. Sometimes he liked to add on extra just so he could effortlessly bulldoze over their assumptions, because no one expects a 90-year-old to bench press a car.

The only thing he couldn’t do, was lay down in the park to watch the birds. Concerned citizens kept checking he wasn’t having a heart attack, which got so annoying that he started jumping up and shouting “boo!” if they dared to poke him.

Yes, old man, fun, highly recommended. The problem with getting older, is that memories fade if your thoughts don’t stray back to refresh them often. After living many centuries, Harry had forgotten more faces than most people met in a lifetime.

When he was forty he couldn’t name any of his acquaintances from Hogwarts or the guys on his pickup Quidditch team. By eighty, he’d forgotten most of his Professors. At two-hundred, he forgot his uncle’s name and his childhood home. He didn’t care at first; he remembered all the people that he liked enough to catch up with whenever he popped into their lifetimes.

But there were exceptions. For the period between 1980 and 1997, since he had never been permitted to return there, he had lost anyone who had died. Cedric, Colin, Tonks, and how many more? He didn’t even know he’d forgotten them until he passed them in the street and got that niggling feeling, like running through a ghost. It took hours of rooting around in his head with a pensive to track them down.

Harry had met Snape and his parents in their childhoods, but that was hardly a reflection of the adults they had become. He’d barely known them; kids aren’t interested in talking to grownups. He almost didn’t recognise Snape as an adult. Had he always had such poor personal hygiene habits?

They were the ones that fell in war for him; the very same people he’d sworn to never forget. In this universe, all those experiences only existed in his mind, but that shouldn’t lessen their sacrifice.

…

The more he learnt, the more leads he discovered. The world was different, there were new opportunities and endless trails to keep him busy.

Archaean called them excuses. “Aren’t you too old to run and hide from ghosts?”

In Britain, it was unavoidable, he ran into heart clenching faces at every turn. Tom was, ironically, the easiest familiar face to be around. There was no prior attachment, he was basically a stranger. It was bad sign that _he_ was the person Harry sought out when he needed to relax.

Archaean wasn’t wrong. Harry wasn’t exactly sure what he was researching at this point, every bit of evidence just pointed out that this was the new normal. But he needed to do something, because on some days, he felt like he’d rather run all the way back to his timeline and spend the rest of eternity going in circles, than turn and face this.

Merlin, it was hard to get out of bed on those days. He only managed with micro-missions: get up, make tea, find an old friend, do something nice for them.

He was still fighting. He had long ago perfected a mantra of live in the moment, survive in the now. He had a problem, he was lonely, and to fix it he had to make friends.

These were new people, and he wanted to get to know them, because he knew that had the makings of some of the best people in the world. He would be able to laugh easily with them, to relax and share and trust again.

One day. He didn’t want to believe that he was here to stay, just yet.

He allowed his meetings with Riddle to drag him out of the obscure caves he preferred and into the social scene. He’d run into Ginny and make polite small talk about Quidditch and it would feel distant, but Harry had been used to distant. It was learning that her favourite team was the Tornadoes, not the Harpies, that hurt a bit too much.

But when his last name got him an invitation to the Potter Estate, Harry had staged a disaster in Vietnam to evade it. He knew he wasn’t ready for that.

_They don’t know you, and they’re no lesser for it._

Ron’s temper had still mellowed, Hermione had learned how to relax, the Twins had still gotten their shop, Sirius had found peace, Remus had found a family.

_What did you ever do for them that they couldn’t do for themselves?_

He wanted to help them and make them happy in return. That was all he’d ever wanted.

_You’re the piece that doesn’t belong. You’ve broken half the things you’ve touched._

But they were already happy.

 _Look how much better off the world is, when you didn’t exist_.

Get up, don’t complain, keep moving.

…

It proved very fruitful, broadening their horizons. Harry and Archaean discovered more in three years than they had in the last six hundred.

But it was mostly Archaean. She’s a great spy. She could blend in with local flocks, people would say anything with her around, and there was no place out of her reach.

It was her stalking that eventually allowed Harry to intercept Charles Xavier. He had turned out to be a surprisingly hard man to track down, for a bloke with his primary residence available in a google search.

After the fifth request for a meeting was politely deflected, Harry suspected he was dealing with a man who knew precisely how to deter uninvited visitors. It was masterfully done. Even with all his experience, he honestly couldn’t tell if the Xavier was just too busy.

After Archaean got his itinerary, Harry felt less guilty, and wrangled an invitation to the next genetics conference.

Xavier was a good speaker. He gave a compelling lecture, but politics was against him, and they would never listen to anything like logic. It was only going to get worse once social media exploded. The mutants had quite the battle ahead of them.

Harry waited until the shouting had died down, but Xavier spotted him first. He allowed Harry to approach, which the wizard decided to interpret optimistically.

“Professor Xavier,” he smiled as they shook his hands, and decided to throw all his cards on the table. If Xavier brushed him off now, he’d have to get tricky. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. We have a mutual friend in Kamar-Taj who speaks very highly of you, particularly your advice.”

Xavier’s eyes sharpened. “Does she?” he smiled, “I haven’t seen her in an age, how is she? You know, we should discuss it over lunch sometime this week.”

“I hear you’re a busy man, Professor, will you have the time?” he challenged.

“There’s always time for friends of friends. How does Thursday, 1 o’clock, at the Bowls Club suit you?”

“I’ll see you then.”

…

“Do you play?” Xavier gestured at the chess board on the table before him.

Harry took the opposite seat and felt a pang of loss that he’d never gotten the chance to surprise Ron with some of the tactics he’d picked up in India. “It’s been a while since I’ve tried my hand at the modern style.”

“Shall we play in the Romantic fashion then? It’s a good afternoon for a brisk game.”

In answer, Harry moved a pawn. They played for a few minutes in silence. The Professor was content to wait for Harry to explain why he had requested the meeting.

Harry had done little more than think of subtle ways to introduce the topic over the last few days. None of them seemed suitable now that he was here.

Screw it. “Can time travel change the future?”

“Now that is an interesting subject to debate,” Xavier said lightly. “But only truly enlightening between friends.”

So name dropping the Ancient One was enough to get his attention, but not his trust.

“Don’t you know me very well? I thought you were a telepath.”

“Your mind stands out, it is a void among open books.” His bishop captured Harry’s knight. “I can sense your surface thoughts, but anything deeper is closed off and would require effort to access. You would probably experience discomfort.”

Huh.

“It is a method I learnt to protect my mind from mental attacks of magical origin. I’m not particularly good. I didn’t think it would even be applicable against your methods.”

“Magic users can learn telepathy?” the Professor wondered, eyebrows rising.

“I believe the arts are quite different. I have been repeatedly told that Legilimency is not as simple as reading a mind. It requires a large degree of study and understanding of human nature to interpret anything correctly.”

Harry spilled his guts. Xavier just had one of those faces. He dropped his shields, which felt a lot like being naked in public with only his hands to cover his privates – but that is what he did, obscuring the fact that his wizards were different to the Ancient One’s students. That wasn’t his secret to share. He stuck his chess strategy back there as well.

The telepath examined that darkened area curiously, but respected Harry’s wishes. There were plenty other things to occupy his time.

Another few minutes of silence, and then Xavier said, “Who are you?”

“Someone who is just trying to understand what the fuck is going on,” Harry snorted.

More thoughtful silence. Harry wondered if he was still rifling around up there. He couldn’t feel a thing.

“If changing the future were not possible, I would have been torn apart three years ago,” the Professor began slowly. “In 1973, I worked with a friend whose mind had been sent back from 2023. It was not their first attempt. They died countless times, in many different timelines, as they tried to find a future in which humanity would win. As I did not die in 2006, I must conclude that we are set on a different path, hopefully one in which most of the population is not killed by robots that were designed to fight mutants.”

“I’d feel better if you could offer evidence,” Harry’s centuries of experience still rebelled against the idea. “But if memories were the only thing to travel back, I suppose comparing the age of your friend’s teeth to his birth certificate isn’t going to get me anywhere.”

“I can only offer my assurance that, as a person intimately familiar with all kinds of mental processes, he was not hallucinating or lying. I saw that future in his mind. But I believe you saw it firsthand.”

“Briefly.” It was kind of nice not having to explain himself for once. “Could I speak with this man?”

“I do not know where he is,” Xavier frowned. “Which is odd, because I have looked.”

“Dead, then?” Harry sighed, getting the feeling that this guy could track down anyone, anywhere.

“I really doubt it,” the Professor’s lips turned up a little, but rapidly dropped again. “But there are other ways to stop a person’s brainwaves.”

Was that more or less morbid? Harry didn’t know.

He digested what he’d learnt. He was a bit disappointed. He hadn’t discovered anything new to help him distinguish between the possibilities. Either he had jumped into an alternate universe where the physics allowed for this rubbish, or a time traveller had changed all of history _and_ physics. And if that was the case, with all that crap Death had said about getting frozen, new channels and new possibilities, Harry suspected he deserved a large chunk of the blame.

Subtle difference, because, to be clear, there's fuck ups, and then there's mistakes on the order of overwriting the entire universe.

“It’s a lot to take in,” Xavier said sympathetically.

“I’ll say.” Harry thought he was having an existential crisis several centuries in the making.

“Can I help?”

How could he possibly make it worse?

“Let’s say you are from a universe where free will is basically a lie, because events follow a preordained path. There is culpability, but there’s no point worrying about it because there’s nothing you can do to effect it one way or the other. How would you feel if you entered this universe? Now there are consequences for actions, but at the same time there aren’t any, because at any moment you can go back and erase your mistakes. Hypothetically,” he added with a wry grin, because they both knew there were probably some wrong details, but there was nothing hypothetical about it.

“I believe I would be hopeful,” the Professor replied seriously. “I suspect it would give my life more meaning. I would see it as an opportunity to change, to grow, to undo injustice and minimise the suffering of any event I knew was coming.”

“Is that a responsibility?” Harry had magic and time travel, even though it was uncontrollable. He could do anything, but did that mean he should do everything? He was torn. “If you have the means, do you owe it to society to do the best you can?”

“No. One does not _have_ to do anything,” Xavier mused thoughtfully. “If, as you say, I found myself in a universe with free will, I would believe that everyone has the right to use it. I would muddle my way along, living by this: always learn, always _listen_. Do not assume that you know best. Take on board the both sides of an argument and critically evaluate it, but decide for yourself how to act.

“Examine what you hope to achieve and decide how much you are willing to pay for it, because there are always consequences. If we have free will then our actions are our fault, it is irrational to blame others. Choosing not to learn about the potential fallout for your actions is still making a choice. But the choice is important. Even arseholes should be allowed to pick and face their consequences. They should not be robbed of their agency by people who do not agree.

“To fully answer your question; I suppose I hope that every person will do their best to affect the world for the better, but I will not force you if you decide otherwise.”

“But you would fight me if I wanted to hurt innocent people.” Clearly.

“Of course,” Xavier answered confidently, even after examining the things Harry had done.

“What’s the difference?” As a person becoming increasingly wary of provoking this man, Harry thought it would be prudent to find out exactly where the line lay.

“In the end, it is your life to live as you choose,” Xavier shrugged. “No one’s free will should be taken away from them. I learnt that very early on, because I _could_. Wouldn’t it be objectively better, if there were no more genocides? No more slavery. No more racism. No more religious fanatics. I could make people treat each other with respect. I could enforce global peace.”

Harry didn’t think that sounded very peaceful.

Thankfully the Professor seemed to agree, because he laughed at himself. “There are many things in this world that should be changed, but people should decide to do it for themselves. It is an argument I have had many, many times,” he added with confusing fondness.

The world was very lucky that Charles Xavier had such strong morals.

Harry had never taken such a hard line about responsibility. In his youth, he’d always felt like he wasn’t doing enough. Hermione called it his hero complex. Then centuries of inflexible fate had made him resigned and less prone to take on more than his fair share of blame.

It was a bit of a sore spot, but that was the point of this twenty questions exercise; to learn what free will was like from a local.

“There aren’t many people who would agree,” Harry decided after some consideration. “Most people would accuse any potential time traveller of doing too little.” They try to make you feel guilty for every scrap of pain that exists. Starting with killing Hitler. If Harry had a knut for every time someone had told him to do that…

“That is because it is easier to see mistakes in hindsight, and they know the feeling of regret caused by not acting while they had the chance. We all have things we would undo, but it is hypocritical for them to refuse to act to change what is coming and then berate someone else for doing the same. Even without visiting the possible undesirable futures, we have our own methods of foresight. We have the patterns of history, that let us predict in the 60s that we would face a battle to secure civil rights for mutants, and we did not need to know the specific outcome to know the risk of provoking resentment with violence. Then we have scientific predictions, which is much the same but on a larger scale. Those people who would be quick to judge you, would be just as quick to refuse to consider historic or scientific predictions, because it would mean a slight initial inconvenience if it were true.”

There was so much truth in that, Harry smiled bitterly. “I outgrew the need to please everyone long ago.”

“Good, because it is quite impossible. For every person that believes you do too little, there will one that believes you do too much. They will be furious with the audacity of interfering with fate.”

“You know what they say about roads paved with good intentions.” Harry had heard all that before too, but he was enjoying the telepath’s insight. “But for the sake of argument, what gives you the right to arrange other lives as you see fit?”

“The right to try to do good?” Xavier asked softly, meeting the wizard’s eyes with intensity. “I was trying to change the future long before I knew it had flying robots in it. We do not need the right. We only require the _will_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two updates in a couple days, aren’t we on roll. Don’t expect the next one for at least a week, I’m exhausted.   
> Well I was going to get into some action this chapter, but Xavier parked his wheelchair in the way and started preaching at me. Some of that is what I believe, the rest is what I think Charles would. He’s nicer than I am.   
> I kept imagining that old Harry looked like Hugh Laurie. And then someone mentioned Stan Lee. Help. I can’t get it out of my head.


	6. Complication

Definition: Complication

  1. A secondary condition aggravating an already existing difficulty  
  2. See:  _Harry Potter_   



… 

“For fuck’s sake, again?!” 

Archaean landed on the back of his chair, and joined Harry watching the video. She was similarly appalled. “That energy is coming from... where, exactly?”  

“Thermodynamics. Is nothing sacred anymore?” Harry had to switch it off. He couldn’t take it. "We are at the point where the fabric of the universe doesn’t make sense. How does physics even work without any laws? The principle of least action is barely a motif here; how can quantum mechanics, atoms,  _any_ _thing_ exist without that? And now this!" He waved a hand agitatedly at the screen. "As far as I can tell, conservation of mass and energy is just ignored when it’s inconvenient.”  

“Transfiguration,” Archaean coughed loudly.  

Harry glared. “Exactly, it’s like they’ve got spells hardwired into their DNA. Except they  _don’t_ _have magic_. They expect me to believe that’s due to a few mutated proteins. Biology doesn’t work like that.” 

Science never used to be so damn frustrating. Even time travel had rules – there was no multiverse, so the past couldn't be changed. But everything else was different now, why not that as well? While the possibility existed, he couldn't throw in the towel.   

“Just email the scientists.” 

“I haven’t finished yet.” He was researching how science had changed. It was slow going. He’d gotten from organic chemistry to electron orbitals before the angry youtube spiral happened.  

“You have plenty of questions already, what are you trying to construct, a manifesto?” 

Perhaps she had a point.  

A few physics professors from various labs responded. There was a higher response rate from the genetics researchers, but many of them just seemed desperate to commiserate with another puzzled mind. Xavier was no help at all: he seemed to think that mutations made sense, but the physics escaped him as well.  

Jane Foster stood out as one of those rare, truly brilliant people. He had to bribe her with leading questions on her research to keep her attention, but it was worth it just for the notes she scribbled in the margins of her university textbooks. One photocopied page was all it took for something to make sense for the first time in the years since he’d arrived. 

He was truly lucky that she was so generous with her time. It helped that they were both working on the same problem, sort of, from different directions. She was interested in getting to other points in space, Harry was interested in traversing time. 

It was a delight to try to keep up with her thought processes. Wormholes hadn’t been sorted out for another hundred years, in his timeline, but she was absolutely heading in the right direction. He thought so, anyway. He had tried to study them, but the theory was a bit beyond him, let alone the maths. Good Merlin he still had nightmares. That class had left him in the dust, but he wracked his brain to throw any relevant thought her way.  

It was complicated stuff. It took about a year into their correspondence, and several rereads of her research papers, before it clicked. The weather events she was studying sounded a lot like something he’d gone through once. But why would the Bifrost be sending Asgardians to Earth every few years? It was a bit concerning, considering they viewed themselves as Midgard’s overlords. 

It wouldn't hurt to warn Riddle to keep an eye on it.  

... 

“You called, dear?” Harry announced himself sarcastically, dropping down onto a seat at the long, empty conference table.   

“Not today, Potter,” Tom said. 

Ah, surnames. It was Business, then, and fairly serious by the look of it. Harry’s mood sobered. “What can I do for you?” 

“There’s is an article going to print as we speak,” Tom said, rubbing his temples. He never would have been that open with Harry a year ago. “Muggle technology caused a magical explosion.” 

“What?” Harry couldn’t have heard that right.  

Tom was dead serious. “If they have the technology to do this, then it is only a matter of time before their sensors can detect the energy frequency, if they can’t already. Exposure is imminent.”  

“Ah shit.” Historically, newly discovered minorities never fared well. “What’s the Ministry doing about it?”  

“The Minister does not think it prudent to panic the masses. He is underplaying the issue, or perhaps he truly believes all will be well.” The curl of his lip made Tom’s opinion on that sentiment clear.  

“You are not allowed to stage a coup,” Harry quipped on reflex. 

“As if I would  _need_  to,” Tom said with a smirk that, at his age, was less English supervillain and more charming old codger.  

Ugh.  

But the humour couldn’t survive for long in that atmosphere. Harry frowned. “Do we have an agreement with parliament to preserve wizard rights as British citizens, preferably in writing?” 

“Yes, and I suppose that's something. I’ve done what I can,” Tom sighed. “In a way, we have been bracing for this for decades. We knew their surveillance systems would find us eventually, but governments all over the world grew complacent as other superhuman minorities were exposed and mostly left to their own devices.” 

“In Europe, for now, perhaps they’ve been treated well, but the world tends to follow America’s example, and they’re handling it rather badly. This is going to be a mess. What about the magical creatures? The Goblin Nation?” 

It was a logistical nightmare. Some magical countries didn’t follow the same borders as their muggle counterparts. Magical China wasn’t communist, magical Czechoslovakia still existed. Just in Britain, wizards had different laws about wildlife trade, the judiciary system hadn’t changed since the witch burnings, they even classified adulthood at different ages. Meshing magical and muggle worlds would mean upheaval on both ends, and no one would be satisfied, but the magical community was small; their culture would be swallowed.  

Tom and Harry shared a look perfect, miserable understanding.  

“We need to know how long we have before they find us,” Tom rallied first. “We need to prepare legislation and procedures so we can come out ahead. If possible, we need to control how we are exposed, to ensure it is in the best possible light. You know muggle technology and science. I need you to investigate Tony Stark and these arc reactors.”  

Trust. Tom trusted his opinion and his skill. 

“You mean you’re asking me, a foreign national, to do some international espionage on behalf of a secret underground society that’s technically a shadow wing of the British parliament, to one of the most powerful men of a nation that takes that kind of thing personally?” Harry checked, just to be sure that Tom had considered all the serious diplomatic trouble this could cause. The fact that trouble alone was not enough to get Harry to consider refusing, let Harry know he was doomed.  

Tom had a gift with politics that someone with Harry’s temperament, no matter his experience, couldn't possibly match. He believed that Tom would use those powers for the benefit of all magic, because that is what Tom loved above all else. If he thought it was necessary, it needed to be done.  

“I’ll do it,” Harry agreed easily. “But I want a direct line to you, in case I need you to drag my arse out of the fire.” 

“You think you’ll require it?” Tom sounded surprised. That was flattering.  

“Maybe I just want you to send me real food occasionally,” Harry was not looking forward to this.  

Tom rolled his eyes, “You can hand me your biweekly report in a restaurant in Italy, if you prefer. Provided the Ministry is not on fire.” 

“ _Written_  reports? Then it’s your shout,” Harry groaned. “I'm going to need the good wine. And use your seedy connections to get me close to Stark, let’s get this over with as soon as possible.” 

“Already done. Here’s your new job, you start at 8 on Monday.” 

“Cocky bastard,” Harry muttered, pulling the documents over for a quick flick through. He frowned, worriedly. "I'm not qualified for this." It was an entirely different field to where he'd worked previously, and a company at the top of the industry wouldn’t be very accommodating to errors.  

"You have a physics degree. I trust that you won't walk in and ask how to operate the light switch, which is better than most. Just fake the rest as long as you can."  

"Why are they hiring researchers in the energy sector, anyway? I thought Stark Industries were in the weapons business?" 

"The company changed tracks. There's been a huge staff overhaul." 

"Convenient," Harry noted suspiciously. 

Tom rolled his eyes. "I had nothing to do with it." 

Harry grunted noncommittally. “So that’s Stark. Is he the billionaire that went missing a little while back? Terrorists or something?” 

“Yes, I believe it was orchestrated by a close confident, likely a high-ranking official in the company. This person possibly had something to do with the arc reactor explosion. Stark may be in a very fragile mental state –”  

“I am not going to use that against the man.”  

Tom sighed. “Be careful not to pity him to the point that it compromises our safety.” 

“There’s nothing wrong with showing a man a little compassion, Tom,” Harry said with as much obnoxious cheerfulness as he could stomach. 

Tom threw a portkey at him. 

… 

"This is your office, Mr Porter." The woman showed Harry in briefly. It was small but modern, for 20th century standards. "You'll be working in Raj Misra's lab, which is just down a floor, if you'll follow me." 

Harry had done his time in universities a hundred years from now, in dirty garages, in Leonardo's workshop and the Department of Mysteries once. Unfortunately, each lab was different. This one, for instance, was filled with engineers.  

He'd never worked with engineers before, but he had a hunch that it would involve a lot of meetings. That was fine. The less actual work he had to do, the better, and if he could get to know his colleges that might be advantageous.  

"Harry Porter," he introduced himself. His first chance to be a secret agent, and that was the code name Riddle had concocted. What a waste. 

Tom had warned him to keep his head down, but Harry thought he would draw less attention if he was just an average, vaguely likeable old man. He'd just keep an eye on their progress, and if they started making any ground, well, he knew a few simple runes that would interfere with the sensitive equipment and make it impossible to take consistent measurements.  

As for Stark, Archaean would watch him. Harry would miss her constant commentary on all his mistakes.  

… 

The life of a physicist, even a physicist spy, was not glamorous.  

The lab had a meeting every morning. His colleagues would debate any roadblocks with their theories, whether that small particle accelerator would be a good use of funds, and Raj would tell Beck to calibrate the spectrometer, again. Sometimes, if they were too efficient, they made up the time with meetings with the other labs.  

Then they would go back to their offices and research the literature, plan the experiments they would need to do, write up a report and send the proposal down to Health and Safety and the Ethics Department, and then re-plan the experiment so the unions didn’t get involved.  

Good Merlin it was boring, but far be it for Harry to complain. The nightmarish regulations were on his side, for once.  

Each afternoon, Harry would go back to an average little apartment in New York and jot down a few points. If Tom thought he would get a comprehensive review after Harry spent the day doing paperwork, he was going to be disappointed.  

There wasn't much to say, in any case. The job wasn’t as useful as they had hoped. Stark didn't seem to trust anyone with the arc reactor technology. Harry's group was the closest, but they were working on all the practical problems of implementing the technology on a wide scale, like the resistance in the cables and building a regulator that could respond to the on/off peak power needs automatically, because the whole world now new what happened when a reactor overloaded. 

Harry wanted to get his hands on a reactor. That would be by far the easiest way to figure out what was going on, but the only one around was in the Iron Man suit. It might be easier to work backwards than to get through that level of security undetected, so Harry would try that first. He grabbed the invisibility cloak and set off for the old Stark Industries warehouse. There, he learnt everything he could about arc reactors, just from what one left behind. 

A strange residue had sunk into the ground. The frequency was very similar to the energy that spells radiated. It wasn’t like a charm or jinx or any kind of transfiguration magic Harry had encountered, but when he cast  _Priori_ _Incantatem_  it returned some sort of signal.That was disturbing on many levels.  

Harry ran scans on the ground, the air, the metal, anything he could find, whether he thought it would be useful or not. He stole some samples that wouldn’t be missed and sent them to Tom with instructions to get Authur Weasley to poke at it.  

He'd gathered every report that MACUSA had on the subject, and there were  _a lot_. The whole building had been on red alert for hours as their systems detected the huge, conspicuous blast. The aurors and obliviators had been frantic and confused. The accidental magic squad that had been triggered, and that sent everyone into overdrive because no single witch was capable of channelling that much energy. An obscurial, however...  

They had ruled that out pretty quickly, thank Merlin. Harry poured over their observations with interest. Accident squad had been some of the first on the scene, they'd seen evidence so fresh, the 'spell' had still been dissipating in the upper atmosphere and the rest of the scene had just caught fire. They described the blast as directed, but like herding cats, it lacked all control. Harry would bow to their expertise, but it was just a shame none of them had seen it happen.  

He had witness reports from a wizard and son, plenty of muggles and some shoddy CTV footage of the first stage. He also had the Stark Industries official statement, and their more classified incident reports.   

Both MACUSA and the muggles reported that the explosion had happened in two stages: the beam, then the boom. 

The company reported that the overload had blown the roof open, indirectly causing the explosion when a large metal girder had fallen into the reactor, damaging essential parts or causing a short circuit. MACUSA claimed that the magical beam caused the second stage explosion, based largely on the assumption that when technology was exposed to that much magic, something bad was bound to happen.   

As best Harry could tell from some personal experience, a short circuit could be caused by metal or by magical interference, but he had one problem with these explanations: there had been a delay. He wasn’t sure how long, since the CTV cameras had been knocked out along with the rest of the grid in the city. But that was the key. Once the beam lit up the sky, the electricity went off. It was the ultimate circuit breaker.  

If the magic had triggered the meltdown, it would have happened immediately. It probably ruled out any internal circuit damage as well, but as Stark Industries said, the girder could have wrecked any number of components. But that could have happened whether the reactor had been overloaded or not.  

Harry concluded that the beam had been magical, but the explosion had been completely mundane, and, for the energy involved, surprisingly small. The beam didn’t directly cause the boom, which mean that muggles could produce crude magic without blowing themselves up.  

… 

A month ago, the arc reactor had been a gimmick, but suddenly, everyone was interested. The energy sector sat up and paid attention. Nuclear physicists were champing at the bit. Biologists wanted to test the radiation to make sure it wasn’t harmful. Even the meteorologists were interested in tracking the effects on the atmosphere.  

None of them appreciated how much extra work they were making for Harry, because this radiation they were all suddenly looking for, that was magic.  

They didn’t know which properties to lock onto yet, but as soon as Stark let them scan a reactor, that would change. That was why, despite the personal inconvenience, Harry was glad that Stark was so paranoid that he wouldn’t even let his own company work on the technology.  

It was hard to Harry to learn about it, sure, but anything that was hard for Harry was impossible for most people.  

… 

"I want to know how he keeps the suit running when the reactor discharges," Tom's tone brooked no argument. "If there is some kind of shielding that would protect technology from magic, I need to know about it before it becomes a problem."  

Now that he mentioned it, Harry didn’t want that showing up in Diagon Alley, or any kind of pocket space. Who knew what would happen. 

But finally, he had good news. "Well actually, Stark Industries did some separate research into that. They recovered the suit Tony used to escape from the Ten Rings and tried to develop it. I'm sure they had all sorts of problems and solutions with the electronics. I recon I can track something down some sort of access." 

... 

"He keeps it in his chest," Archaean said. 

It took a moment for Harry to understand that. "What, the  _reactor_? You're kidding me!" 

Archaean hated it when he did that. She clicked her beak, irritated. "He uses it to power the suit, but he also uses the magnetism produced by the current to hold shrapnel under the reactor and away from his heart." 

"Do you know how long he's had it?"  

"Since Afghanistan." 

"He made that thing in a cave? Shit," Harry muttered, with grudging respect. "But that complicates things." 

He was still working on the problems from her last batch of bad news. Security cameras, doors, alarms, he knew how to handle. Harry had spells that could loop camera feeds, but he had never tried it on an omniscient AI, which unlike a human, might notice the exact repeat. He still hadn't tracked down a way to turn the AI off.   

That was bad enough, but now instead of just cracking a safe, Harry had to track Stark and knock him out. There were so many things that could go wrong. It would take some serious planning. And all that just to scan the reactor... at this point, it wasn’t an acceptable risk for the reward. 

If Stark had the capability to sense his arc reactor energy, Harry didn't want to give him incentive to point it around the city, not until Tom could figure out a way to get a muggle locked into a secrecy contract. If Harry could wipe his memory it would be a different story, but that was impossible. Stark would wake up with a glowing reactor in his chest, with no idea what it was or how it got there, and he would know that something was up. Then would ask the AI, and even if Harry cleared the information out of all the backups, there would be close friends that knew about it. The patent office had the reactors in his name. He probably got a hundred emails a day from people talking about it.  

"There's no stopping this," Harry admitted to himself. 

... 

That was not the news Tom wanted to hear. He got that look on his face.  

"You can't kill him," Harry said, tiredly. "Stark has no clear heir, we have no idea what he's told people to do with his patents. He might leave the reactor to the company, and then we lose the chance to contain it. If he dies, they'll be all over it, and you don’t have to be as smart as the inventor to copy his stuff." 

"Have you figured out how it works, yet?" Tom asked.  

"Sort of? He's got a patent for something that essentially turns a fusion reactor into an electric generator." Harry laid out a dozen scientific papers. "These are the principles: a palladium cathode and heavy water for cold fusion."  

Cold fusion existed. Ok, fine. Harry skilfully ignored the part of his brain that was shrieking in outrage and resolved to just email Jane in the morning.   

"The figures Stark Industry observed from the large reactor match the output calculations," Archaean noted with interest. "That is an insane amount of energy."  

Tom was looking a little pinched around the edges again. Harry hastily ploughed on. "The copper coils around the rim are a sign that he's using induction, but I've got no idea how or why. There aren't any moving magnets, but maybe he's using the moving charges from the fusion reaction to generate a containment field or electricity or something. The patent is remarkably vague about how to sustain or contain the energy, which is what makes all other fusion reactors useless." 

"There must be something else; none of this is new information," Archaean scratched through the papers pointedly. "Top scientists have been trying for a hundred years, if the next step was just difficult, someone else would have done it by now." 

"Exactly," Harry sat back with a helpless shrug.  

Riddle frowned. "Where does the magic come in?" 

"Not a clue." 

"Potter..."  

"What do you want me to say, Tom?" Harry pinched the bridge of his nose. "I can't do any kind of in-depth scan if I can't build or steal one. I can't just bump into the guy at a party. We already know that the reactor doesn’t produce detectable levels of magic until it's firing." 

"Isn't that odd?" Archaean wondered.  

"Not really," Tom counted sourly. "We don’t stop being magical when we're not casting spells, even though we can't detect it." 

"We have two options," Harry decided. "We can go to one of Iron Man's fights and try to scan it then, or I talk to him and ask for cooperation." 

Tom bristled like a grumpy old cat. "Don't be absurd, there's nothing to gain for telling this man how much power he holds over us." 

"If we could get his support, we could stop worrying about the security breach," Harry mused, warming to the idea. "It's risky, but if it doesn’t work, I could erase the encounter. We'd just have to arrange a meeting where I can jam anything electronic that could record it." 

"I would not trust a man of his character. He could not even protect his own secret identity," Tom snorted, and the others had to concede that was a good point. "And don't give me that bullshit about 'who would believe him', that's shaky enough on unimaginative politicians who can't afford to be publicly ridiculed any more than they are already. It's secrecy contract or nothing." 

And they were back to nowhere again. "Well what do you suggest?" 

"We could stage a supervillain attack," Tom mused, and quickly frowned when Archaean let out a sound like a punctured balloon.  

"That is a terrible idea," Harry assured him, trying not to meet Archaean's eyes. He was barely keeping a straight face as it was.  

"I don't know, I think I might enjoy it." 

"Oh, I can believe that." Despite his best efforts, Harry's lips twitched. 

… 

"We don’t really know what magic is." Tom sagged heavily over his whiskey. "Our blood and minds let us channel it, but we are tools, little more than wands ourselves. What is the source? Is it a force or type of energy? Does it come from a reaction, is it a property of a fundamental particle or a mineral?" 

Harry propped his shoulder against the other wizard's in an effort to keep his head off the surface of the bar, which had looked highly suspect earlier in the evening, when he had been sober enough to see such things. 

"What if the palladium in the earth is the source of all the magic that we tap into." Tom's eyes were too wide and the foul alcohol from his rapid breaths washed over Harry's face. "What if they dig it all up?" 

The idea stabbed Harry right down to the gut. "That won't happen. Whatever magic is, they won't take it." 

"Optimist," Tom accused.  

"No," Harry admitted, and he wasn’t sure who was doing more of the leaning at this point. "We'll stop them," he promised. "They don't get to take whatever they want, just because they want it." 

… 

"Stark is acting erratically," Tom announced. "His reckless behaviour has made the news again." 

Harry had noticed too. "It's making everyone at work nervous." 

But they only got the trickle-down effects, Archaean had the problem at the source. "He's planning to make Pepper Pots the CEO of the company. He regularly spends over 50 hours in his workshop." 

"We need to know why," Tom told Archaean. She nodded seriously. A desperate Tony Stark was not good for anyone.  

It took a few risks, and in the end Archaean was short of few feathers, but it did not take her more than a day to find out.  

"Palladium poisoning," she announced as soon as Harry apparated to her location to retrieve her.  

"Fuck," Harry uttered. "Does Stark know? Then why the hell has he left it in?" 

"The shrapnel." 

"There are other things that make strong magnetic fields. Can’t he hook up a car battery or a neodymium magnet or something?" 

"It would mean abandoning the suits." 

"He'd rather die," Harry swore more colourfully this time. "Well that's tough, he's not allowed." 

"Tom's not going to like it," Archaean warned, because she could predict his thought patterns too well by now.  

She was correct as usual. Tom was in a right state.  

Harry tried to reason with him. "We don't have time to wait for a contract, this kind of poisoning is very serious." 

He scowled, and a bit of Voldemort shone through. "No, Potter." 

But Harry hadn't lost a fight with Voldemort yet.  

… 

"I need a favour," Harry said.  

Charles stared intently. "Yes, I can see that. Why are you interested in Tony Stark?" 

"I've been looking out for him. He's in trouble, he's being poisoned. I can't tell you any more than that. I need you to trust me." 

Harry didn't know if he could ask this. He and Xavier played regular games. They enjoyed discussing genetics, politics and philosophy. They occasionally indulged in old man gossip about their friends. It was how Harry knew Xavier had a loose association with Stark through his father. But their easy friendship had never been tested, until now.   

Charles was eerily silent. Harry pulled a flask from his bag. "This is a blood replenisher. It's a potion commonly used by my people, but I've given it to people like him before without any complications. Each dose will filter the heavy elements out of his system for a week. Invite him to scan it for ingredients, test it on rats, I don't care, he just needs to drink it. If he's allergic to anything, there are other options." 

The telepath's stare made Harry squirm. It was worse than McGonagall's. "While Tony and I are not particularly good friends, if this hurts him... I won't forgive that." 

Worse than McGonagall's and Dumbledore's  _combined_. 

... 

Days passed with no improvement. Harry wasn't particularly surprised. It had been a long shot. A man like Tony Stark would only trust something if he knew how it worked, and apparently he wasn't desperate enough to try anything, yet.  

That might change. Harry would give it time before he cornered him for a chat or asked Archaean to dose his food. 

In the meantime, he thought he might visit Foster's lab. His emails to Jane had bounced with an out of office reply for the last three days, which was unheard of.  

Harry had a feeling, just the beginnings of unease. Only something incredible or terrible would get her away for her equipment, because Jane didn't do holidays. Unless she had to attend a conference, she didn’t even do weekends or normal hours. Science was her hobby and her social life. She got stressed when she wasn't working.  

Three days wasn't that long. It was probably nothing, but it wouldn't take long to check.  

But of course, as soon as Harry left the building that afternoon, he was promptly arrested.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What a week. My computer died. I didn't lose any information –backup, my people, there's some solid life advice for you– but it's been a pain to hunt down a keyboard. I refuse to write on a phone, so this update was a bit later than I intended. Sorry about that.


	7. Revenge

Definition: revenge

(noun or verb)

The action of hurting or harming someone in return for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands.

...

The last time Harry had been arrested, it had been in the fifteen hundreds, so it took a while for him to pin down that niggling feeling. He’d been scooped off the streets in much the same way, although there had been fewer black cars and strapping young gentlemen to escort him firmly inside.

He didn't fight them. He slipped into the role of a harmless old man he'd been playing for a hundred years. He grumbled a bit about the rough handling, did a bit of ‘what is the world coming to’, a little ‘what is this, how dare you’, and asked them to mind his back. All that he could do in his sleep, which was fortunate, because his mind wasn't on the task at all.

This was not a battle of strength, but information. Something had gone _very_ wrong, and he needed to know how much they knew before he armed them with more charges against him.

What illegal things had he done recently? Trespassing. Breaking and entering. Some light stalking. That didn't warrant this level of response. This was the government. It could only be the spying, which brought to light some more serious charges. Espionage. Perjury. Several instances of forgery and fraud, but that was mainly Tom's work. Maybe he was on a terrorist watch list. Or worse.

He was in the car before he realised that they actually weren’t allowed to _do_ that. No words, no warning, no song and dance about rights and charges. He wasn’t being arrested, technically, he was being kidnapped. Which, well… _shite_.

Being an immortal wizard and universal alien probably wasn't explicitly illegal, but it could certainly provoke this. But they shouldn’t even suspect any of that for another two years, because he hadn’t arrived until 2012.

The burning question was why? Had Stark made the connection between Xavier's compromising information and one random employee? Had Tom's cover fallen through?

Speak of the devil. It was probably time to notify the backup.

The first thing the agents had done was confiscate all his belongings. They hadn't found the extended compartment on his bag, so he was certainly dealing with muggles. If they couldn’t spot that, they would never get his watch. His hands were cuffed, but it was easy enough to lift the buckle of the wristband. It immediately warmed. It would project all sound and images directly to its partner. Standard issue for Unspeakables. Harry loved the things, he'd been beside himself when Tom let him steal it.

Now that he was on the clock, so to speak, Harry stopped messing around and resorted to British insincere politeness. "Excuse me, will this take long? I have an appointment in fifteen minutes."

"You'll miss it, Mr Porter," the big shot in the middle said. That was odd, but it gave him hope that they unaware of the fake identity, that would take out a significant chunk of the trouble he was in. "We will organise an alternate time for you."

Stranger and stranger. "You have me at a disadvantage."

"I am a representative from the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division."

SHIELD. Some kind of national security branch. It wasn’t a very clear title, but Harry had heard worse from organisations that picked the acronym before trying to find thematically appropriate words to fit it. The Ministry had a designated a whole sub department to that particular pursuit.

"And why am I being arrested?" he asked.

They were reluctant to answer that, as he’d suspected. "You are not being arrested."

They didn’t know any of it. They had nothing to charge him on. And yet, he was still wearing cuffs.

The unknown was worse. It made Harry’s palms sweat. "Excellent, I'll just be going then."

"We need to question you regarding your association with Jane Foster.”

This was about _Jane_? Well there went his nice easy intervention from Tom. "And this –the hoo-hah with the abduction and sunglasses indoors– is standard procedure for a friendly interrogation?"

“It is a serious matter regarding national security.”

“Right.”

First thought: she succeeded and the military wanted licence to use her work. But they would try to negotiate with her first. This was an extreme response, provoked by extreme measures.

Amended thought: someone else had succeeded, America had was worried they would weaponize it, and a pair of researchers and an intern would not catch up fast enough, so they wanted to appropriate it. It was a distinct possibility because in his universe at least, the Asgardians had already done it.

“What is your involvement with Foster’s research into wormholes?”

“Not waiting for the small room and the bright light?”

“As you pointed out, this is a friendly interrogation,” he said in a way that confirmed that he was trying good cop on the way to the facility just to pass the time.

Harry wanted to be contrary on principle but he really couldn’t risk a fight now. If they didn’t know his secrets, he had everything to lose. This was bigger than just him; he’d suffer through it until an opportunity to leave presented itself.

“I’m just Jane’s soundboard.”

“We have her emails.”

“Then I’m sure you’ve already made up your minds.”

So maybe Harry wasn’t very adept at patience.

…

It was a long drive and muted whine of the sirens ensured it was not the traffic that caused it. They took him far out of town, but there were no windows for him to gauge the direction or location. Most of the trip passed in silence, the interrogator having quickly exhausted his questions.

The car pulled up in a secure garage. Harry didn’t get a chance to observe the facility from the outside either, before he was hustled further in.

The artificial lighting revealed something they had not noticed, initially in their haste and then in the dark. “Holster!”

Harry was forced roughly against a wall before he knew what hit him, and he was rapidly losing patience with the American experience. It was taking serious constraint not to blast the arseholes and their grabby hands across the room. “Take off his shirt.”

He growled lowly as they yanked his shoulders back and ripped the thing over his head. They spun him around, leaving the cloth hanging awkwardly over his wrists and cuffs, right there in the hall. “Do you mind,” he hissed. It was cold.

Unexpectedly, the revelation that he wasn’t hiding a gun didn’t deescalate the situation. Tension suddenly crackled through the air. Harry was unnerved. Something obviously had a significance to them but he didn’t have the slightest idea what or why.

“What is that supposed to be?” the leader pointed, and Harry glanced down on reflex at the pain amulet stuck to his chest. He never did get around to finding a better spot for it.

“Obviously not a weapon,” Harry said testily.

“Sir, I can’t touch it,” a goon remarked. “There appears to be a barrier around it.”

The leader nodded at the minions and they once again seized Harry’s arms, frogmarching him as the leader strode out ahead and spoke lowly into a radio. “Is the interrogation room in the X wing free? I suspect at this stage that Porter is a mutant.”

…

“So,” the man folded his arms. “An engineer and a mutant. We’ve worked with your kind before. Have you heard of Gambit?”

Harry shrugged and let them write his alibi. Anything was better than wizard. He prayed fervently that no one in this building was important enough to have been told about magic. The more of a feel he got for their personalities and ethics, the less he wanted them aware of his culture. All patriotism and no compassion. He’d met people like them all over history, usually on the wrong side of it.

“When did this become about me?” Harry pointed out. “Being a mutant isn’t a crime, and as you pointed out when you abducted me, you have no other cause to arrest me.”

“We’ll get to Foster later. For now, you’re going to tell me about that thing and what sort of power you’ve imbued it with.”

Harry thought quickly. If it looked like reticence from a distance, well, he was in that kind of mood.

“I’ve got all day, Porter.”

“It’s a lightning rod,” he lied confidently, as if that made any kind of sense. They already thought he was like Gambit; if he kept his answers in that general area, hopefully confirmation bias would be on his side. Besides, if it came down to fighting, he could limit himself to lightning spells. They were versatile _and_ satisfying.

“Take it off.”

“Can’t. It’s magnetised.”

“You said it was electric.”

“It’s both. They’re the same thing. Honestly, kids these days, it’s like you’ve never opened a textbook,” Harry lamented.

“What does it do.”

“Power things. It’s like a battery.”

“What could it do to people.”

“Nothing. Don’t poke it with a fork.”

“The shape, the octopus. Did you choose that for any particular reason?” he asked seriously.

It had six branches, not eight. It looked like an insect, if anything. Truly their education system was failing. “Of course not,” he scoffed, meeting the man’s eyes evenly.

“Right then.” To Harry surprise, the he dropped the subject. After all the fuss it caused, that only put Harry further on edge. “On to Jane Foster. How did you meet?”

“By email.”

“Where were you?”

“England. About two years ago.”

“Why?”

“I had a question about wormholes.”

If they were going to making him go through all the information they already knew as well as the stuff they wanted to find out, it was going to be a long day.

…

The interrogator –or the wanker, as Harry had dubbed him because it was like speaking to Abraxas Malfoy without being dazzled by the hair– he subtly turned off the recording at the end of the interview.

Harry narrowed his eyes, feeling the situation get worse by the second. It was well into dangerous territory now.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” the wanker leaned forward, suddenly all smiles again, despite the fact that Harry had successfully told him next to nothing. “I would like to offer you an employment opportunity.”

He couldn’t be serious. After _this_ treatment? “Sorry, old chap, I already have a job.”

The smile slid off like grease. “You misunderstand. If you don’t work for us, you don’t work for anyone.”

“You don't want me,” Harry chuckled, despite the spike of adrenaline. He made a pretty average physicist, but he knew a few brilliant ones. “You want my access to Jane Foster or Tony Stark. What's happened?”

The wanker’s face went blank.

“Was it an overlord from outer space?” Harry guessed, and damn, he was actually right. He grinned, and it wasn’t wise to taunt them, but they had brought him to the point of pissed off with no return. “You shouldn’t do this place up so Area 51, it makes a bloke suspicious.”

In a moment, there was a gun in his face, a flash from the corner of his eye, and the wanker slumped over, stunned.

“The cameras are off,” Harry announced absently. He dropped the shirt and handcuffs. Stupid of them. The cover had let him scratch a rune into the metal hours ago. He untangled the shirt from the metal and put it back on. “What took you so long?” he asked Tom.

“The Irish.” Riddle had the wanker strung up like a puppet, eyelids peeled open. “You were handling it well enough.”

Tom’s eyes narrowed at the wanker and the grip on his wand went taught. Not a good sign. “Change of plans. Wipe out the surveillance in the rest of the building.”

Harry held out a hand and a second later his wand zoomed eagerly into his palm. Yes, _that_ wand. Harry glared at it. He’d specifically summoned the spare, but he should have known this one would misbehave.

Tom hadn’t noticed yet, too busy doing his mind reading or wiping or whatever. It was only a matter of time.

“I hate muggles,” Riddle muttered, just after Harry had finished casting.

“Don’t think about it so much. It’s bad for your blood pressure,” Harry recommended. Nothing managed to surpass his lowest expectations as often as people. “Just ruin their plans, fix their mistakes and make it look like an accident.”

“I see we’re on the same page,” Tom said calmly, before blowing the door, not just off its hinges, but through the adjacent wall. “I’m giving you temporary Unspeakable status. Permission to use magic in front of and on muggles. There will be no witnesses, if I make myself clear.”

Harry gaped at the crumpled metal. So they were look for a fight. Ok. Right. Harry readied his wand and fell in beside the furious wizard. “What did these guys _do_?”

“This wing of the building experiments on, in their minds, nonhumans. Mutants, enhanced or superhumans. They’ve currently got one muggleborn, but they don’t know it. They’ve killed subjects in the past.”

“Right.” The Elder wand hummed, drawing a certain amount of problematic attention. Tom eyed him, and oh Merlin they’d be talking about this later. Harry pretended not to see it. “Who is in charge?”

“Doctor List.”

Harry summoned his bag and released the hounds from hell. The little mechanical flies lined up on his hand, waiting for the name of their victim. “ _Portus_. I hope you don’t mind dealing with the trash when you get back to the office, Tom.”

“Not at all,” Riddle agreed darkly. “I suspect I shall enjoy it.”

The halls were not crowded, but there was still a steady stream of agents as everyone in the vicinity ran to investigate the bang.

Harry didn’t need to do much.

Riddle’s spellcasting was a thing of terrible beauty. He wielded fiendfyre seamlessly. Serpents and birds, bears and cats roiled behind them, poking into every crack and crevasse, leaving nothing by ashes in their wake.

Harry just deflected any bullets that weren’t vaporised and thanked his lucky stars that Voldemort had never taken his skinny teenage self as seriously as he’d taken Dumbledore.

Over the roar of the flames, alarms started to blare. “ _Asset out of containment_ ,” the PA system screamed.

“If they’ve locked down the computers, I’m going to feel less charitable about your venting,” Harry told Tom.

Tom raised a flashing security door and let it slam down again behind them, leaving the fire to continue outside. “They don’t store top secret information electronically. I will retrieve their files and set the boundary for the fire. There are five prisoners down the hall to the left. I will meet you back here in ten minutes.”

“Got it,” Harry took off at a jog.

There weren’t cells. It would have been better if there were filthy cells. Instead there were reinforced tables and chairs and the smell of disinfectant. There were frosty coffins stacked with all the regard of brooms in a closet, behind the highest security door Harry had ever seen.

Cryofreeze. Great. Luckily, he’d left one of the guys in the lab coats alive, or he’d never meet Tom’s deadline.

“ _Imperio_. Release all the assets.”

It was still a close call. Harry stood in the corner tapping his wand impatiently while the man went through the layers of security and the release procedures to defrost them safely. Seconds ticked by.

A young girl was the first. She woke in stages, initially unable to see or hear anything, and before that started coming back, she began crying.

Harry had no idea what he should do. She looked like she needed a hug, but no doubt she had had enough unsolicited touching for a lifetime. She couldn’t have been more than seven. Fuck. Harry transfigured her cryochamber into a mound of fluffy blankets, and it didn’t feel like he’d done nearly enough.

The next prisoner, still looking like a corpse next to them, couldn’t have been more different. He was blue, for a start, and fully grown.

The third and fourth were both looked normal, both young. The fifth was middle aged and gave Harry an idea of what the Potter hair would look like if it migrated all over his body.

“That’s odd,” Harry remarked. His lab assistant hadn’t stopped working. He went back to the computer, initiated twice as many procedures as before and pressed an alarming red button. Five, Tom had said. This looked like six.

The last cryochamber emerged from a different section of the wall. It opened and a man in combat gear with a shiny metal arm was briefly visible, before Harry’s unwilling accomplice obscured his view.

“Assets should be sedated.”

“No –”

The fifth man came up roaring and swinging blindly at thin air.

“Shit!” Harry jumped, and threw a hasty shield over his charges. They were all still basically comatose. It happened so fast that Harry didn’t even have time think about the researcher, still under the effect of the curse, waiting placidly. It wouldn’t have been too bad, if not for the long metal claws.

Oh dear. What a mess.

“Here, listen to me,” Harry scrambled up and tried to draw the man away from the others. He was breathing like a racehorse and growling like a freight train, but he was also squinting and clearly disoriented.

“This is a rescue,” Harry tried, and hastily dodged the swipe aimed at his voice. Perhaps cheering charms were not just the resort of the weak mind, but also a practical preventative in such situations.

The mutant blinked and shook his head irritably. It was a long step from peaceful giggling, but Harry would take it.

“We’re escaping,” Harry said carefully, checking on the others in case of any more surprises. The sixth man was awake and watching them with empty eyes. Yeah, one problem at a time. Harry stayed well back.

“I’m going to lead you out of here.”

The claws were still retracted, but the mutant was no longer frothing to use them.

“We’re going outside?” the first girl said, in heavily accented English. She had managed to sit up.

The clawed mutant flinched and whirled around. Harry level his wand in an instant. “We are all friends here,” he said firmly.

Calm slowly descended. When Harry though the situation was on a slightly blunter knife edge, he approached her.

“Yes, we are going outside. First, we will go into the hall to meet my friend, and then we will all go to nice house in Westchester to meet a man called Charles Xavier.”

When that didn’t make much of an impression, he repeated it in Spanish, until his tempus charm sounded. “It’s time to go.”

He offered the girl his hand, and to his surprise, she decided to take it.

“Follow me," he told the others.

The sixth straightened. “Orders accepted.” The fifth started growling again. Neither of those things sounded much like progress, but Harry took a deep breath, and turned his back. He’d layered it with shield charms first, because he wasn’t stupid.

Tom’s cloak was smouldering around the edges and he had a look on his face that made everyone anxious. Harry hastily greeted him, before fatal misunderstandings could occur.

“Is that the portkey?” There was a long piece of rope in Riddle’s hand.

“Yes. Quickly now.”

After Tom’s count and a raised eyebrow, Harry added. “Turns out there’s a higher level than top secret.”

Harry grabbed the other end of the rope and urged the others to touch it. No one was comfortable being that close to five and six. “This will teleport us to safety,” he explained. “Please don’t stab anyone when we get there.”

“3. 2. 1.”

The world vanished.

…

“In my defence, this was a spontaneous visit,” Harry said, straightening a dent in the wheelchair “And even if it hadn’t been, I don’t know Erik’s schedule, there was no way I could have known that he’d be here.”

“I realise there are extenuating circumstances, but if you had just appeared in the grounds instead of the foyer, I might have delayed him.”

“I wasn’t driving, but I’ll be sure to let Tom know. Really, Charles, I wouldn’t have risked it. Does he always go off the handle like that?”

“After learning that literal Nazis are around, experimenting on and murdering mutants? I couldn’t say. I’ve never seen him that angry before,” Charles sighed. “Thank you for bringing them here, despite everything.”

“Have you been able to help with their memories?”

“It’s an ongoing process.”

“At least you managed to get Bucky to stop following me.”

“His mind is the worst. They didn’t wipe it so much as take an egg beater to it repeatedly. He has regained enough of himself to understand that he does not want anyone one interfering with his head. I must respect that.”

“Will he be alright on his own?”

“I suspect he will untangle it eventually. Perhaps one day he will return and request help.”

“And the others?”

“Logan’s mind has healed, structurally, but anything very damaged was simply replaced. Those memories are gone. His experience will be a patchwork of his past,” Charles shook his head sadly. “But you want to know about Tatiana. She troubled me, in the beginning. She has repressed a large portion of her life. It is not healthy, especially at her age. I am glad she is going with you two. I believe Tom will understand her far better than I could.”

“I think she’s growing on him.” Tom hadn’t ignored her or cursed her or anything.

“He is surprisingly good with her,” Xavier agreed. “Does he have family?”

“None. But he was a teacher at one stage. I think he went into the job in spite of the kids, and came out the other side more attached than he’d planned. He pretends to be above it all, but he’s always speaking about their curiosity, lamenting the way the system quashes it to make dull adults.”

“I felt much the same for the first few months of my career. My priorities changed. The mission slowly faded.”

“You look troubled.”

“Erik was right about one thing. Whether the cryofreeze was used to contain them or specifically to stop telepaths detecting their brainwaves, the effect is the same. There could be more out there and I wouldn’t know it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You handed me six amnesiacs and two of them want to extract violent retribution alongside my terrible influence of a friend. I suspect there is very little I _can_ do, besides keep an eye on them and try to stop Erik toppling the American government.”

Harry shuffled guiltily, but there was one prominent bright side. “It could be worse. Tom could have joined them.” One damaged foyer was a small price to pay for animosity between Tom and Erik. “Could you imagine if they’d _gotten along_?”

“That must never happen.”

“I quite agree."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still got no computer. Help. It’s killing me. 
> 
> I don’t really like this chapter, but I do like the idea of unleashing Bucky, Logan and Erik on Hydra, so there you have it. A little cross-fandom chaos. 
> 
> I’m invoking creative license. I didn’t know where Wolverine was at this point in the revised timeline, but he’s been inexplicably caught and experimented on in so many movies, I recon I can use it as a plot device whenever I feel like it.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote about 50 000 words of this in 2014, but I didn’t like the direction it went after the third chapter, so I scrapped most of it and haven’t continued. And yet, I quite like the beginning and the terribly complicated ideas that sit behind it.  
> In 2015 and 2016, there was no end in sight, but I decided to post it, and hope that any questions you ask might spark something and help me pick a direction for this story.  
> You did that, so as of 2017, I am rolling out a plot. Brace yourself.


End file.
